Nebraska U.S. Senate race draws national attention, money, as polls show close contest

A rush of new political ads attacking Republican Sen. Deb Fischer and her independent challenger Dan Osborn have blanketed Nebraska's TV airwaves in recent weeks as the closer-than-expected race draws national attention and out-of-state dollars.

Heartland Resurgence, a Missouri-based political action committee that has spent millions backing conservative candidates over the last decade, spent $478,530 earlier this month placing attack ads against Osborn that dubbed the former labor leader "Democrat Dan."

The ad, which featured Osborn's face alongside cutout photos of national Democrats including Vice President Kamala Harris, aired repeatedly in local TV markets throughout the Sept. 20 Husker football game against Illinois — which drew 4.2 million viewers nationwide .

Days later, Osborn's campaign released an ad featuring a Fischer lookalike adorned in a jacket dotted with the logos of some Fortune 500 companies, like Goldman Sachs, executives from which have donated to Fischer.

Appearing in the ad, Osborn said the Senate is made up "of a bunch of millionaires controlled by billionaires," labeling Fischer as "part of the problem."

The ads — along with new polling and millions of dollars worth of additional ad buys from both campaigns and a pair of progressive-funded PACs backing Osborn's populist bid to unseat Fischer — have prompted national observers to examine the race in a new light.

After the influx of spending and a new poll last week that showed Osborn leading Fischer by a single point in the race , the nonpartisan election analysis website The Cook Report on Wednesday shifted its forecast of the race from "Solid Republican" to "Likely Republican" — suggesting the race is more competitive than previously thought.

Fox News also shifted its forecast a step toward Osborn , a U.S. Navy veteran who is seeking to become the first non-Republican elected to the Senate in Nebraska since 2006.

The moves come after a nonpartisan pollster contracted by Osborn's campaign surveyed 558 likely Nebraska voters last week and found 45% planned to vote for Osborn compared to 44% for Fischer, a former state lawmaker and rancher from Valentine who is seeking her third term to the Senate.

The poll showed that 18% of Republican respondents supported Osborn over Fischer, closely mirroring an independent poll last month that suggested 17% of GOP voters polled planned to vote for Osborn. The August poll, though, showed Fischer with a 1-point lead over Osborn.

Nearly half of the respondents in the August poll hadn't heard enough about Osborn to have an opinion about him.

But in last week's poll — conducted as the "Democrat Dan" attack ad enveloped the state — 24% of respondents said they weren't sure of their opinion on Osborn, indicating his name recognition has spiked as Nebraska lurches toward the Nov. 5 election.

Vince Powers, the former chairman of the Nebraska Democratic Party, said backers of Fischer "helped Dan Osborn immensely yesterday" by running the attack ads that "gave Osborn the name I.D. he had been lacking in the campaign.

Everyone now knows Osborn is running against a frightened Fischer whose only accomplishment is to break her pledge to serve only 2 terms," Powers said in a social media post last week.

Meanwhile, Perre Neilan, a political consultant and the former director of the Nebraska GOP, said while Osborn is "tapping into the frustration" that many Nebraskans feel with both political parties — and benefiting from national donors willing to gamble on his candidacy — Republican voters "will come home" in the end.

"I still feel confident in Deb Fischer's reelection," he said.

Fischer won more votes than any other candidate in Nebraska's statewide primary in May , outpacing both former President Donald Trump and Nebraska's junior U.S. senator, Pete Ricketts. Osborn, who had to petition to appear on the November ballot as a third-party candidate, was not on the primary ballot.

In a statement, a spokesman for Osborn's campaign said Osborn "has built a movement of support in Nebraska, while Sen. Fischer has acted like she doesn't want to do the work of campaigning."

The spokesman noted that Fischer, who declined to debate Osborn this election cycle, hasn't held public campaign events this year and hasn't participated in a town hall since 2017.

"So now that the race is getting more attention, it makes sense that Sen. Fischer is resorting to dishonest smears on TV," the spokesman said. "But Nebraskans aren't falling for it: a poll taken while Fischer's false attack ads were blanketing the airwaves showed Dan's best numbers yet."

A spokesman for Fischer's campaign, which has largely dismissed recent polls that have indicated the race is close, said she eschews "staged political events" and instead has "always met Nebraskans where they are to help solve their problems — in August alone, she had more than 100 stops in towns across every part of the state."

In her own statement last week, Fischer said there is "nothing independent about Dan Osborn."

"He's funded by billionaire Democrats, supports Social Security for illegal immigrants and loves Bernie Sanders," she said. "We are confident that as Nebraskans learn more about who Dan Osborn is and what he stands for, they'll know he's not right for Nebraska."

Fischer's campaign has shared reports from the conservative news outlet The Washington Examiner tying Osborn to Sanders , the independent U.S. senator from Vermont who describes himself as a democratic socialist.

A spokesman for Osborn called the attempts to link him to Sanders "dishonest" and said warm comments Osborn had made about Sanders have come in the context of the Vermont senator's support for the 77-day strike Osborn helped lead at Kellogg's in 2021, which also received support from Ricketts , then Nebraska's governor.

Osborn's campaign has been boosted by ad buys funded by two super PACs: Nebraska Railroaders for Public Safety and the Retire Career Politicians PAC, which have combined to spend more than $1.6 million in support of Osborn or attacking Fischer.

Both PACs are funded by progressive donors including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a D.C.-based nonprofit that conservatives have called a "Democratic dark money group."

Aside from Heartland Resurgence, the Missouri-based PAC funding Osborn attack ads, Fischer's campaign has funded most of its own ad campaigns.

Fischer's campaign had raised more than $4 million from January 2023 through June 2024, and had nearly $3 million on hand by the end of June, according to Federal Election Commission filings and the campaign spending tracker OpenSecrets.

Osborn had raised $1.64 million and had around $650,000 on hand.

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State government reporter