A Democratic challenger who said she intends to drop out of November’s race for the US Senate in Nebraska to clear the way for an independent candidate has won the state’s Democratic primary.
Cindy Burbank ran against William Forbes, who Democrats contended was a Republican plant in the race, with the intent to drop out if she won. Forbes, a pastor who has voted for Trump and opposed abortion access, is currently registered as a Democrat.
While the state Democratic party endorsed Burbank for the primary, it has backed Dan Osborn for the general election.
Osborn, an independent, is seen as the best hope to beat the Republican senator Pete Ricketts in November. Burbank wants to clear the field to give Osborn and Ricketts a head-to-head matchup, she has previously said.
And in the state’s second congressional district, known as the “blue dot” of Omaha and its surrounding suburbs political organizer Denise Powell beat out a crowded field of Democrats to face Republican Brinker Harding in November in a race where Democrats expect to pick up a seat in Congress.
John Cavanaugh, a state senator, came in second to Powell. Cavanaugh’s opponents in the Democratic primary field pointed out that if he won the general election and left his legislative seat, it could jeopardize the state’s electoral college vote system and deprive Democrats of an electoral college vote.
The second congressional district is a key pickup potential for Democrats if they want to regain control of the US House. It is rated as leaning Democratic by the Cook Political Report, which analyzes elections.
Republican representative Don Bacon announced last year that he would not seek re-election, giving Democrats more of a chance to pick up the seat in the politically mixed area of the right-leaning Plains state.
Powell and Crystal Rhoades, a county clerk who finished third, had warned that a Cavanaugh victory could lead to Republicans overturning the split electoral college vote system in the state.
Most US states use a winner-take-all method to award electoral college votes: whoever wins the whole state gets the entirety of its electoral college votes, the process by which the US elects a president. But in Nebraska, each congressional district awards an electoral college vote. And in the “blue dot” of the second congressional district, Democrats have won the electoral college vote in three of the last five elections, including for Kamala Harris in 2024.
Republicans have sought to change Nebraska’s electoral college voting process to a winner-take-all method, most recently in 2025, when the effort failed by two votes. If Cavanaugh wins the general election for the second district, the Republican governor, Jim Pillen, would get the chance to appoint his replacement through 2028, which could give Republicans the numbers to overturn the “blue dot”.
It is not clear that Republicans will actually make an attempt to overturn this process – they, too, have benefited from it, depending on the year.
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