Democrats’ Dirty Election Trick Throws Deep Red Senate Seat Up For Grabs

OMAHA, Nebraska – As Republicans hope to narrowly hold on to the Senate, the last state they’d ordinarily have to worry about is Nebraska. Yet polls predict that Sen. Pete Ricketts (R) has less than a one percent advantage over his opponent.

Viewed by most Americans as a deep-red farm state, the race here has largely flown under the radar – but Republicans could lose a Nebraska Senate seat for the first time in 20 years because Democrats played a trick of the sort that has become a massive scandal in Alaska.

The Democrat nominee for Nebraska senator, Cindy Burbank, dropped out of the race shortly after winning the May primary, leaving Ricketts to face off with an “independent”: Dan Osborn. He’s running as the de facto Democrat candidate without the label, in hopes of attracting enough Republicans who would never vote for someone with a (D) behind his name. The head of the Nebraska Democrat party had endorsed Osborn all along, and Burbank dropped out one day after Osborn submitted enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

Burbank had announced that this was her plan in advance, according to Secretary of State Bob Evnen, a Republican. In his capacity overseeing elections, he had removed her from the Democrat primary ballot for that reason, saying the law required candidates to be running in “good faith.” Burbank sued to be reinstated – losing before a judge, but ultimately winning on appeal on a technicality: that the objections were filed too late.

It seemed clear that the plan came ultimately from the Democratic Party itself when it refused to replace Burbank in the general election. Remarkably, the Democrat Party fought in court to ensure that there would be no Democrat nominee.

The candidate who came in a distant second in the Democrat primary, William Forbes, had argued that the party was required to replace a candidate who dropped out. A judge declined to side with him. Democrats accused Forbes of being a Republican counter-plant who joined the race to foil the Democrats’ scheme.

Though Osborn has denied coordinating with Burbank, it would not be the first such scheme he’s been linked to: Osborn staffers previously infiltrated a left-leaning third party and tried to dissolve it.

Mary Jane Truemper, head of the Nebraska Republican Party, told The Daily Wire “they’ve done all kinds of tricks … it’s just unreal, the schemes they have going on … The Democrats feel like this is their last chance to bamboozle the voters.”

Osborn is a tattooed union organizer in the mold of Graham Platner. Truemper said Osborn has tried to give the impression that he’s a moderate by telling different groups different things. “One group he said he was for helping Trump build the border wall. Then another group, he told them the border wall was racist,” she said.

But like Platner, the campaign has been defined by verbal blunders. Leaked audio shows Osborn mocking the state’s rural and Republican residents, calling them “Billy Bob and wife Mary Jane from f*cking Red Cloud … their lives probably suck.” He’s also accused of making racist and sexist remarks.

Over the summer, The Daily Wire exclusively reported that Osborn’s daughter was tied to online sex work. She also happens to have been paid by his campaign.

Osborn tells Nebraskans he would caucus with neither party in the Senate. Truemper said that’s “of course” a lie. But if it’s true, that would pose problems in its own right: A member of neither caucus could receive no committee assignments in the Senate, making them virtually powerless to shape policy on issues like agriculture that affect the state. The two current independents in the Senate, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Angus King (I-ME), caucus with Democrats and receive the committee assignments through which most of the work is done via that party’s leadership. 

Ricketts is a former Nebraska governor who was appointed to the seat in 2023 when Sen. Ben Sasse resigned, and won a special election in 2024 to complete the remainder of his term, but has never won a full term before.

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