Sen. Pete Ricketts is projected to win reelection in Nebraska against independent challenger Dan Osborn, a bright spot for Republicans on what has been a brutal night for their party.
Ricketts portrayed Osborn, one of several independent candidates across the country who ran a competitive campaign, as “Democrat Dan” to discredit his pledge not to caucus with either party if he made it to Washington.
“They want to tear down this country and rebuild it into something completely different,” Ricketts said to a crowd in Bellevue on Election Day, referring to the Democrats running away with full control of Congress. “Folks, they have a radical vision for this country. But tonight we showed them: it stops here in Nebraska.”
Ricketts faced headwinds from Washington, as Democrats tied him to Trump and the products of his policies: an affordability crisis, unpopular tariffs and the Iran war. But he was a rare Republican in a closely watched race to survive what has been a watershed election for Democrats.
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The race “got a lot closer than it ever should have been,” said Ryan Horn, a Republican strategist based in Nebraska in an interview prior to Election Day. “That’s almost certainly attributable to the unpopularity of the president and the economic difficulty.”
He added that “the Republican Party has a big advantage here in the number of registered voters.”
It took Republicans millions more in spending than they previously imagined to save the seat from Osborn in a typically safe state for the GOP.
President Donald Trump, who called Osborn a “fake independent” and argued the candidate was secretly aligned with Democrats, visited Nebraska to rally support for Ricketts in the final weeks before Election Day. Vice President JD Vance also rallied in the state in late October alongside the incumbent senator.
Until October, when the Senate Leadership Fund announced an additional $8 million for Ricketts’ campaign, the senator had largely funded his own campaign — more than half of the $14 million his campaign raised since the beginning of the cycle came from him.
The Osborn campaign railed against Ricketts’ wealth throughout the race, portraying the Republican senator as an out-of-touch billionaire.
Republicans more broadly crafted a message that Osborn, who also ran an unsuccessful-but-competitive Senate campaign in 2024, was disguising himself as an independent. They pounced on the Democratic support Osborn received: he was criticized by the Ricketts campaign for using ActBlue, a fundraising platform dedicated to Democrats, to raise money.
This was Ricketts’ first election to a full Senate term; he was appointed by the Nebraska governor to fill the seat in 2023 after Sen. Ben Sasse stepped down, then won a special election in 2024 for the rest of the six-year term.
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