It’s an interesting moment in Nebraska politics. The Republican Party is in disarray: the old guard Death Eaters, who have all the money, have been pushed out of party leadership by the gremlins they fed after midnight, and the party is advancing a slate of candidates that range from entry-level panty checkers running for Board of Ed positions to Dracula Caillou trying to keep the U.S. Senate seat he was appointed to by his pocket pet, who is currently inhabiting the governor’s mansion. The opposition party in this deeply red state is always going to be fighting an uphill battle, but 2024 presents rare opportunities for Democrats and other contenders.
Yet it appears that no opportunity should go unsquandered for the Nebraska Democratic Party. One Republican running for re-election this year is Deb Fischer, a barely sentient human cabbage currently in her eleventh year of occupying a seat in the U.S. Senate. So to defeat Fischer, the Nebraska Democratic Party has put forward…. no one. They produced not a single candidate to challenge a Republican incumbent who has the resume and charisma of a tepid gas station hot dog.
That is quite the dereliction of duty, but it’s okay, because an independent candidate, Dan Osborn, is running against Fischer. And while we don’t agree with Osborn’s platform 100%, this is finally a candidate who is running to represent working people. He checks almost all the boxes and certainly all the boxes that can be checked by a viable statewide candidate in Nebraska. What’s more, it actually looks like he can win.
And here is where the Nebraska Democratic Party steps in: to fuck it up.
On May 15, the day after some pretty promising results in some of the primary races, the chair of the NDP publicly tweeted that Dan Osborn had lied to the NDP about wanting their endorsement, and that now that he had jilted them, the NDP would be running a write-in campaign.
Let’s be clear here: we have no idea whether Dan Osborn ever indicated to the NDP that he wanted their endorsement. His public statements certainly imply that he has no interest in it while some politicos say internally the campaign did want the endorsement. But let’s just say that he did, that he gazed into the eyes of the NDP and promised that one day they would be together then ghosted them.
NOBODY CARES.
This is completely immaterial to literally everyone in this state except the approaching zero number of people whose personal identities hinge on the insider conversations of the state minority party.
What does matter to many, many people in the state is a living wage, healthcare, and bodily autonomy. These are more important than whether Dan Osborn left the NDP on read.
But what the NDP is threatening to do here is expend their extremely limited resources to promote a doomed write-in candidate–after they failed to materialize such a person as an actual on-ballot candidate!–simply in order to stick it to Dan Osborn for not wanting to Insta their relationship status. Instead of pouring every iota of their time and money into someone like Tony Vargas, who has a shot at Don Bacon’s seat, or Kristen Christiansen, who can beat book-burning genital inspector Liz Davids from the Board of Education, they are going to muster their resources to push some random’s name as a write-in to siphon off some votes from literally the only candidate who stands a chance of beating the semi-autonomous anti-choice human squeeze bottle of Miracle Whip running as the incumbent.
