Nebraska’s Senate primary has been thrown into chaos, all because of a 79-year-old pastor who is either an extremely bizarre Democrat or a Republican plant meant to split the vote.
William Forbes entered Nebraska’s Democratic primary in early March, just before the state’s filing deadline, CNN reported Monday. This came in defiance of state Democratic Party leadership, who are backing independent candidate Dan Osborn in the race to defeat incumbent Republican Senator Pete Ricketts. State Democrats had not submitted anyone for their own primary so Osborn could go directly to the general election without facing a Democratic challenger.
The move is an unorthodox one by state Democrats, but it could pay dividends. In 2024, Osborn, a Navy veteran and union leader, came within seven points of defeating Republican Senator Deb Fischer. It was a shocking moment: A progressive independent with zero name recognition almost defeated an establishment Republican, while President Donald Trump carried the state by 20 points. Strategists suggested at the time that Osborn was the perfect example of the kind of candidate Democrats should run to win back working-class voters.
But the Osborn plan has since been upended by Forbes. If Forbes wins the primary, he will likely take hundreds of votes away from Osborn simply because he will technically be the Democratic candidate. These votes could be crucial in such a low-population state.
Things begin to smell fishy when one looks into Forbes’s political history. According to CNN, Forbes has voted for Trump multiple times and is anti-abortion. While he told CNN he was a lifelong Democrat and not a GOP plant, he could not name a single Democrat he had voted for in the past. Instead, Forbes “grew frustrated and said the party needed to return to the ‘morality’ it represented under President John F. Kennedy.”
Forbes attended a conference in January sponsored by the Nebraska GOP. “I’m trying to get information from everybody,” he said when asked why he went to the event. “I think for myself. I’m a free thinker.”
Forbes also deleted a Facebook page containing some of his sermons, which were reviewed by CNN and contain indications that he is more conservative than he claims.
In one sermon, Forbes criticized the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street protests, as well as “cultural Marxism”, which he said was harming American institutions. In another, he referred to Joe Biden as “dementia Joe”; in a third, he thanked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and ex-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for restricting abortion rights.
“He is running to trick voters,” Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb said on March 3, adding that Forbes’s campaign was a “political maneuver engineered by Pete Ricketts to split the opposition vote.” Ricketts’s campaign denies this.
State Democrats are fighting back through a woman named Cindy Burbank, who filed for the Democratic primary solely to defeat Forbes and has said she plans to immediately drop out if she wins and endorse Osborn. Nebraska’s Republican secretary of state initially removed Burbank from the ballot, arguing she couldn’t run in good faith after making such statements. Burbank promptly took her case to the state Supreme Court and was reinstated.
This wacky state race will be a fascinating one to watch—the dates to remember are Nebraska’s Democratic primary, on May 12, and the state’s Senate elections, on November 3. Hopefully Democrats—through an independent—can flip the Senate through the Cornhusker State come the end of the year.
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