Last year, the Republican Party in Nebraska underwent a transition. The new GOP that emerged from this process remade itself into a vehicle for Trumpism, mirroring the national Republican Party. Its metamorphosis complete, the new Nebraska GOP set itself to the task of assimilating elected Republican officials not yet wholly committed to the new populist program.
The enterprise largely failed, leading the party to turn against its own members. Ahead of Tuesday’s primaries, the state party “refused to endorse any of the Republican incumbents who hold all five of the state’s congressional seats,” the AP reported. Indeed, in some races, the Nebraska Republican Party endorsed candidates running to unseat incumbent GOP officials. In the end, the state GOP only embarrassed itself.
The Nebraska GOP sought to rid itself of Senator Pete Ricketts, the Republican tapped to fill former Senator Ben Sasse’s seat last year, by backing his primary opponent. On Tuesday, Ricketts handily defeated his opponent with nearly 80 percent of the vote. The party backed another challenger to incumbent congressman Adrian Smith, but that, too, was a debacle. As of this writing, Smith’s challenger secured the support of only 19 percent of the Republican voters in Nebraska’s third congressional district.
Where the state GOP didn’t actively attempt to oust its own members from the offices they occupy, it simply snubbed them. The party declined to endorse Senator Deb Fischer and Representative Mike Flood, a brush-off that drew upstart Republican challengers into their respective races. Fischer easily beat back the challenge with nearly 80 percent of the vote. Flood won his race with nearly 82 percent of the vote in Nebraska’s first congressional district.
The focus of so much populist anxiety, Congressman Don Bacon might have been the Republican Nebraska’s Trump loyalists most hoped to rid themselves of. In Bacon’s four terms in Congress, he established for himself a record of conventional conservative governance and independence, but it’s his unwillingness to blindly toe whatever the pro-Trump line happens to be at any given moment that so rankles his detractors. His opponent, Dan Frei, is a former Tea Party activist-turned-populist who nearly defeated Republican representative Lee Terry in 2014. Frei was seen as the populist right’s best chance to score a victory on Tuesday night, and he turned in a spirited performance. But it wasn’t enough. Bacon emerged victorious on Tuesday with over 60 percent of the primary vote.
And yet, Bacon had some advantages on which the Nebraska GOP can no longer count. He enjoyed financial support from the Congressional Leadership Fund, a PAC aligned with the GOP’s more establishmentarian figures. The state Republican Party, meanwhile, has languished in the fundraising department since it began to mimic the national GOP’s more Trumpy bent. As the Nebraska Examiner reported, “The state GOP’s fundraising has fallen off since the transition to new leadership.” But it was the fondest hope of the populist wing that “energy from some activist Republicans” could make up for that deficit. It could not.
Ultimately, Nebraska’s populists did not reflect the will of the people for whom they presumed to speak. The party they captured sacrificed its influence and fundraising in the effort to align itself more closely with the man in whose image the national GOP has remade itself. And at the end of the day, it showed itself to be a paper tiger. The few populists capable of critical introspection must be asking themselves today what it was all for.