Nebraska's Senate Race Is a Mess – And We Have Our Voting System To Thank

OMAHA, Neb. - On May 12, Nebraska Democrats went to the polls for a Senate primary that was anything but normal. The woman who took 89% of the vote had already announced she planned to drop out if she were to win. Her opponent in the Democratic primary was a Trump-voting, anti-abortion pastor who couldn't name a single Democrat he'd voted for when pressed by CNN.

And the preferred candidate of the Democratic leadership, independent Dan Osborn, wasn’t even on the ballot.

Elections like this one are a sign of a dysfunctional democracy. While rising polarization and partisan animosity are certainly a factor, the "weirdest race in America," as Politico called it, didn't happen just because Americans are as divided as they have been since the Civil War. It happened because America's winner-take-all voting system, known as first-past-the-post, creates incentives for treating elections as a competition between teams rather than a means of citizens expressing their preferences in representation.

The general election showdown between incumbent Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts and independent challenger Dan Osborn has the potential to be a genuinely competitive and interesting contest. But how that matchup came to be shows some of the flaws in the incentives created by our current system of elections.

The Contenders: Pete Ricketts vs. Dan Osborn*

To understand the weirdness, let’s start with the end point: This November, Nebraskans will have the choice between Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts and independent challenger Dan Osborn.

Sen. Ricketts served two terms as Nebraska's governor (2015 to 2023). When he left office, his successor, Jim Pillen, promptly appointed him to the US Senate to fill the seat vacated by Ben Sasse, who departed to serve as the president of the University of Florida. This appointment has served as an attack line from Dan Osborn, who has posted on X that Sen. Ricketts didn’t earn his seat but rather gained it through less than democratic means:

The system of replacing senators who leave office differs from state to state, but it often involves appointment by a singular individual in the given state, often the governor. It’s not the most democratic means of selecting a successor, especially given the well documented incumbent advantage.

However, in 2024, Ricketts won a special election for the remaining two years of Sasse's term, defeating Democratic candidate Preston Love, Jr., by 25 points – a margin that exceeded even Trump's 20-point win.

Dan Osborn is a Navy and Nebraska Army National Guard veteran who spent 20 years working as an industrial mechanic and steamfitter in Omaha. He made his name in 2021 by leading an 11-week strike of Kellogg's workers after the company pushed for concessions in a new union contract while posting record profits during the COVID-19 pandemic. He'd been registered as a nonpartisan voter since he first registered in 2004.

When Osborn announced his 2026 run against Ricketts last July, he framed it on X in explicitly populist terms:

But this cycle is the second one in a row where Dan Osborn has run for a Senate seat in Nebraska, and the ‘24 election has a lot to do with the weirdness in the current one.

Nebraska Senate 2024: Osborn and the Democrats

In 2024, with no Democratic candidate running against incumbent Sen. Deb Fischer, Osborn entered the race as an independent. He ran on a populist, working-class platform (support for labor rights, gun ownership, tougher border security, and opposition to national abortion bans). He spent his campaign traveling across the state and talking to as many Nebraskans as he could. 

This strategy almost worked in winning him the seat. He received 47% of the vote in a state Donald Trump won by more than 20 points; it was the strongest performance by an independent candidate in a Nebraska US Senate race in history.

In a three-way race between a Democrat, Republican, and independent, it would be nearly impossible for the loser of the race to hit 47% of the vote total. But the ‘24 Nebraska Senate race wasn’t a three-way race – the Democrats didn’t run a candidate.

The relationship between Osborn and the Democratic Party in 2024 was complicated from the start. The Nebraska Democratic Party, believing it had no viable candidate of its own, cleared the field for Osborn, according to Party Chair Jane Kleeb, to "keep our ballot line open so we could form a coalition."

After Osborn refused to accept the endorsement of any political party, Kleeb and the Nebraska Democrats condemned Osborn for breaking what she said was a promise, and the party briefly explored running a write-in candidate before ultimately deciding against it. 

Despite the friction, national Democrats spent money in support of Osborn through outside groups. The Senate Majority PAC – the main super PAC of Senate Democrats – spent $3.85 million supporting Osborn's 2024 campaign, while Osborn also received individual donations from the leadership PACs of Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, and Sheldon Whitehouse, as well as a $2,000 contribution from Elizabeth Warren's Senate campaign. Osborn also received a maxed-out $57,800 contribution directly from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

All of that made Osborn's "independent" label a persistent target for Republicans throughout the campaign, and it set the stage for the Democratic primary in 2026.

The Democratic Primary: A Race Nobody Was Supposed to Have

When Osborn decided to run again against Sen. Ricketts in the ‘26 election, Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb made the party's position clear:

But since elections, including primaries, are generally state-run affairs, a major party can’t just decide to cancel the contest or select a winner ahead of time. With the party leadership’s preferences being to sit out the election and support an independent, but an election still moving forward, things got weird.

William Forbes, a 79-year-old Lutheran pastor from Paxton, Nebraska, filed for the Democratic primary on the last day before the deadline in March 2026. He has voted for Donald Trump multiple times. He is anti-abortion. He attended a leadership summit sponsored by the Nebraska Republican Party in January 2026. And when CNN pressed him to name a single Democrat he'd voted for in his life, he couldn't do it.

Normally, a candidate such as William Forbes would be unlikely to win when his history and policy preferences are so misaligned with the party in whose primary he’s running. However, since the Democrats had made the decision to support Osborn as an Independent, they hadn’t recruited a candidate to run. With Forbes on the ballot, they needed someone to run to prevent him from appearing on the November ballot as a Democrat and making it a three-way race, so they recruited Cindy Burbank.

Burbank’s campaign message was clear: She was running to prevent a three-way race. She believed Forbes was a plant by the Rickett campaign, a sentiment shared by the Democrats. She promised to drop out of the race if she won it.

(From her donation page) Pete Ricketts, who is running for reelection, is putting in a candidate loyal to him in the DEMOCRATIC primary – to split the vote against him, so he wins easily. He’s running an anti-abortion activist named Bill Forbes, who has posted in support of Pete Ricketts.

Despite legal challenges by the state Republican party, Cindy Burbank remained on the ballot and ended up winning the Democratic primary with nearly 90% of the vote. She’s expected to drop out of the race and throw her support behind Osborn.

It’s The System That’s The Problem

Step back and look at what the most powerful democracy in the world produced in Nebraska on May 12:

A Democratic primary between a person whose history and views don’t align with the party and a person who promised to drop out if she won. A Republican primary with an incumbent who has a massive name recognition and cash-on-hand despite being underwater on favorability in some polls (Tavern has a noted Democratic bent). And an independent who is functionally also the Democratic candidate but never appeared on a ballot.

This situation is the outcome of America’s voting system and partisan politics.

First-past-the-post is the voting system used in most American elections. It's simple: whoever gets the most votes wins, regardless of whether they get a majority. You don't need 50 percent plus one; you just need more than anybody else.

This creates a brutal dynamic when there are more than two candidates. If two candidates share a similar ideological coalition, they split each other's votes, potentially handing the election to a candidate neither group would have preferred. This is frequently called the "spoiler" problem.

This system creates terrible incentives. For a political party, the goal is to ensure there is only a single candidate on the ballot that is appealing to voters who might vote for you, while trying to get multiple candidates who are ideologically close together to “split” the vote of those who won’t. The rational move in such a system is to try to support candidates you don’t want to win in an attempt to sink the coalition that supports your opposition.

In short, the parties and candidates in Nebraska are acting rationally in a system that is set up irrationally.

It’s a clear sign that something is wrong with the incentive structure. In a functioning democracy, parties compete. They offer their best arguments and let voters choose. They adopt popular views because they want people to vote for them. What first-past-the-post creates instead is a calculus where the losing party's best move is sometimes to not play, and both parties have an incentive to create chaos in each other’s primaries.

Systems like ranked choice voting, where voters can rank candidates in order of preference, eliminate the spoiler problem. If your first-choice candidate is eliminated, your vote flows to your second choice. You can vote for the candidate you actually want without "wasting" your vote or inadvertently helping the candidate you like least. Maine and Alaska use ranked choice voting for federal elections, and those races consistently look very different, involving more genuine competition, cooperation, and outreach.

This Won’t Be the Last Election We See Like This

The Nebraska Democratic Senate primary will not seem like an anomaly for long. Republicans and Democrats have long been accused of supporting Green or Libertarian candidates to syphon support away from the other major party, but efforts such as these are growing more overt. Over the past decade, it's common to read stories about parties or candidates supporting individuals in the opposing party’s primaries they believe will be easier to defeat.

These actions are, given the incentives in the system, rational.

Nebraskans are likely going to get a competitive Senate election in 2024, but it’s not necessarily the one that they would have chosen with a more functional electoral system that aligned the candidates’ incentives with the voting public’s. Democrats didn’t have a true option in the primary, and they won’t have someone running on their line in November. Campaigning turned ugly, and the courts needed to intervene on multiple occasions.

November might return interesting results in the Cornhusker State, but it's worth sitting with what the system required to get us here… and asking whether a voting system that makes a race this twisted is really the best we can do.

The Nebraska general election is November 3, 2026.

*The writer of this article served in a leadership role at an organization that considered endorsing and making a contribution to Osborn’s 2024 campaign.