Ricketts easily wins Nebraska U.S. Senate primary

Pete Ricketts was victorious in his Republican primary contest Tuesday night against four novice opponents, based on unofficial results.

Ricketts received 78% of votes cast in early ballots. The Associated Press called the race in Ricketts' favor around 20 minutes after polls closed Tuesday.

The incumbent Republican Senator was seeking reelection for his first full six-year term. He was appointed to the position in 2023 by Gov. Jim Pillen and easily won the special election to complete the term of Sen. Ben Sasse.

Ricketts, who was in Kearney on election night, said he was grateful for his supporters, and looking ahead to the general election.

“We are very grateful for the support of Republicans in this primary and we're going to continue to work hard throughout this election campaign,” he said. “This is just one step. We're moving on to the general election right now. We know we’ve got a tough fight ahead, and we're going to work hard, just like we do every election.”

Ricketts also addressed the economy on Tuesday night, saying making things affordable is a priority moving forward.

“So it is one of the things people are concerned about,” he said. “We need to make sure we're continuing to focus on that affordability issue. We're doing it in the Senate through our housing bill to try and make housing more affordable. And we’d certainly like to see this conflict the Middle East get wrapped up as soon as we could. But we’ve got to balance that off with the fact that we can't let a country that chants ‘Death to America’ have a nuclear weapon and a missile that could reach the United States.”

Opposing Rickets were Todd Knobel from Lincoln, Mac Stevens from Bushnell, Debb Schultz from Grand Island, and Eric Mortimore from Kearney.

The November general election may prove more challenging for Ricketts. It’s expected that independent candidate Dan Osborn will be included on the ballot. His campaign continues to circulate petitions seeking the 4,000 signatures needed to qualify. The campaign claims it’s likely that three times that number will be delivered to the Secretary of State for certification well ahead of the August deadline.

Osborn told Nebraska Public Media News, “We'd love to turn them in at some point in June (to) solidify ourselves on the ballot.”

Ricketts addressed the upcoming general election, and said he wants to debate his challenger.

“We're used to tough races. We've had those in the past, and so we're going to run hard, just like we do every campaign cycle,” he said. “And (we) think Dan Osborn is going to try and hide from who he is, and part of our campaign will be exposing him for all the things that he is trying to hide from.”

Even without running a primary election campaign, Osborn’s fundraising efforts for 2026 have been on pace with Ricketts established campaign organization.

“I think what that shows is viability,” Osborn said. “2024 wasn't just a one off for us. We're back and people are still interested in this brand of politics”

In 2024, Osborn opposed Sen. Deb Fischer as an independent, attracting a surprising 47% of the vote against the incumbent Republican.

In a poll paid for by supporters of Osborn, the Chicago-based Tavern Research found an online sample of likely Nebraska voters favored the independent candidate over Republican Ricketts by five percentage points. Tavern is a new player in political polling soliciting answers though internet ads and text messages. The survey showed voters favoring Ricketts over any candidate running as a Democrat.

In a statement to the Omaha World-Herald the Ricketts campaign dismissed the survey as a “fake poll.”

The Democratic primary came down to Cindy Burbank, a pharmacy technician from Omaha and Bill Forbes, a Lutheran pastor from Paxton. Burbank won easily with 89% of the vote.

The election became a confusing muddle of candidates with conflicting motives behind their campaigns.

When it was revealed that Forbes had occasional interactions with the Republican Party and voted for President Donald Trump, the Nebraska Democratic Party dismissed Forbes’ campaign as “a political maneuver engineered by Pete Ricketts to split the opposition vote.”

Burbank acknowledged on her candidate website that her campaign’s goal was to block Forbes from getting on the general election ballot.

She also said she would drop out of the race , if she won the primary, which caused her to briefly be taken off the ballot by Secretary of State Bob Evnen before the Nebraska Supreme Court reinstated her.

Voters registered with the Legal Marijuana had the choice of Earl Starkey of Minatare or Mike Marvin of Omaha as their candidate for U.S. Senate in the General Election.

Marvin led Tuesday based on early ballots with 755 votes, 66%, to Starkey’s 383 votes, amounting to 34%.