With 20 days left before the 2024 elections, a very unexpected U.S. Senate race has popped onto our radar screen. Senator Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska) finds herself in a surprisingly competitive race against Dan Osborn, a blue-collar worker and labor leader who served in the Navy. No Republican expects to be in a dogfight in a statewide race in Nebraska, and if Osborn were running as a Democrat, there is a strong likelihood that Fischer would be far ahead right now.
Osborn, however, is running without any party affiliation, and both polling (which I tend to distrust) and Fischer herself are indicating that he has a real chance to actually win. The Fischer camp has been crying out for a couple of weeks now that they are underfunded and need cash to stave off the surprisingly strong challenge Osborn is giving them.
I still have my doubts about whether Osborn can actually win this race. In the end, with control of the U.S. Senate on the line, I expect most Nebraska Republicans will “come home” and vote for Fischer, and in a heavily red state, that should be enough to get her over the finish line. However, I also believe that if Osborn were running as a Democrat, we would not even be entertaining the possibility that he might win or even come close, and I find this case particularly interesting because I predicted this possibility seven years ago.
In a column published in the Observer on June 26, 2017 (“To Advance In Blood-Red States, Democrats Need To Abandon Them”), I suggested that a number of states were hopeless for Democrats and that the best course of action in such states—like Nebraska—would be for the Democratic Party to stop running candidates in statewide races and instead support independent candidates. I noted that in two states where this approach had been tried, an independent running against a Republican, without a Democratic opponent in the race, had won the governorship in Alaska in 2014. I also mentioned that another independent candidate ran for the U.S. Senate in Kansas the same year and ran the closest race that state had seen in decades. And more recently, in 2022, the same situation happened in Utah, with a Democratic-backed independent coming closer to winning a U.S. Senate race than any Democrat had done in about 50 years.
My view was that it was better for Democrats to get behind a candidate who might give them a chance to defeat a Republican than to keep putting up candidates who were guaranteed to lose in states where a majority of voters simply will not vote for a Democrat, period. An independent who will side with Democrats roughly half of the time is better than a Republican who will almost never vote with Democrats at any time. By taking away the stigma of the Democratic brand, which is toxic in states like Nebraska, a better chance would exist to defeat Republican candidates in general elections.
Based on the results where this approach has been tried, it seems clear that my suggestion was on target, and Osborn’s race may be the crowning example of my theory. Democrats in a number of deeply red states may want to look at Osborn’s example, and the others I have mentioned here, and consider the possibilities. I think there are millions of voters in deeply red states who consistently vote Republican but do not necessarily love the Republican Party—they simply hate Democrats.
As I said, I still do not expect Osborn to win—I expect Nebraska’s Republican tendencies to win out—but I can no longer dismiss the possibility out of hand. Today, I am moving Nebraska’s Senate race to “Leans R” and recharacterizing it as a race to watch closely.