Nebraska state leaders outline plans for legislative session, future elections

With the 2024 general election in the rearview mirror, leadership from both major parties in Nebraska are looking ahead to the upcoming legislative session.

Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb and Nebraska Republican Party Chair Eric Underwood are each trying to advance different policies, but both parties face similar challenges at a time when nonpartisanship is on the rise nationally.

Prior to her current role, Kleeb was an activist who worked with farmers, ranchers and Native American tribes in attempt to stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

She was first elected as the Nebraska Democratic Party Chair in December 2017 and has been re-elected three times since.

She said the party had 504 elected Democrats across Nebraska when she first assumed office. Today, that number is 1,025.

“We have doubled the number of Democrats elected since I've been chair and we're really proud of that,” she said.

But the increase hasn’t translated to bigger victories in the state.

Since Kleeb was elected, Democrats have yet to win a single Congressional race or statewide office.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris each won an electoral vote in the Omaha metro’s 2nd Congressional District in 2020 and 2024, respectively, causing the district to be known as the state’s “blue dot.”

However, Republican Don Bacon has won his Congressional race in that same “blue dot” in five straight elections, dating back to 2016 when he defeated Democratic incumbent Brad Ashford.

Republicans easily won the 2nd and 3rd Congressional Districts and Republican Pete Ricketts soundly defeated his Democratic opponent in his Senate race.

But independent Senate challenger Dan Osborn gave Republican incumbent Sen. Deb Fischer her closest challenge yet.

Osborn won two of the state’s three congressional districts, but it wasn’t enough to overcome Fischer’s margin in CD-3. Fischer won the state by less than 7%.

Kleeb said partnering with independents could be the best way to end the Republican’s recent monopoly on statewide offices.

As chair, Kleeb changed the NDP’s rules to allow independents to vote in the Democratic Party primary and she may work with them to win future elections in Republican-heavy districts.

“I think that we can be strategic and create alliances with independents,” she said. “Does an independent run in CD-1, does an independent run for Attorney General or Secretary of State and Democrats run in some other offices so we're not competing against each other, and rather creating an alliance to give Nebraskans a choice?”

Underwood became chair of the NEGOP during the state party’s convention in July 2022, after ousting former chair Dan Welch.

Underwood was the former Lancaster County GOP Chair and had unsuccessfully run for Lancaster County Commissioner in 2020.

He said he was unhappy with how the old state leadership was able to remove delegates elected at the county level over social media posts, among other grievances.

“The state party just said, ‘You know what, we don't want you here. We've determined that we don't like the way you post things on Facebook. We don't like you talking bad about elected officials, so we're not going to credential you,’” Underwood said.

He recognized that a majority of Republicans agreed, and undertook what he called, “Operation Maverick,” which changed parts of the party constitution and removed the former chair through a series of votes requiring a two-thirds majority.

“Sometimes you just have to be bold and make a change if you really want to see a culture and environment switch,” Underwood said.

Since taking office, Underwood said the number of people involved at county party conventions has doubled from 2,000 in 2022 to 4,000 in 2024.

Partisan voter registration efforts

The number of registered voters from each of the two major parties have trended in opposite directions since 2020, according to data from the Nebraska Secretary of State’s website.

Since then, Republicans have gained around 15,000 registered voters, while Democrats have lost more than 23,000.

The number of nonpartisan voters has increased by about 3,000 in that same timeframe.

Leaders in both parties hope to increase their partisan voter registration numbers in the coming years through voter drives.

Kleeb said that’s something the national Democratic Party hasn’t prioritized until recently.

“It's probably going to be shocking to listeners, but the party nationally has not invested in partisan voter registration,” she said. “About 20 years ago, the party decided that it’s best that 501(c)(3) groups do registration, and it wasn't until this last year that the party started investing again in state parties to do partisan voter registration.”

Kleeb said the state party registered 10,000 Democrats in the past year because it finally had the resources to do it.

She also gives Underwood and conservative activist Charlie Kirk “a lot of credit” for their work registering Republicans in Nebraska during the last election cycle.

Kirk visited Nebraska in September ahead of the Huskers’ football game against Northern Iowa. Underwood said he registered 100 people on UNL’s campus that day.

Underwood hopes to continue the party’s momentum through more events in the future.

“Imagine if you accelerated that methodology and think of what it could do, exponentially more, in picking a red-white game, picking any sports games that happened here, pick the influencer,” he said. “We have enough influencers around here. We can have ways that we bring them in.”

What is a Democrat/Republican?

Both parties have also worked to define what they stand for.

Underwood said two documents define what a Nebraska Republican is: The state party constitution and the party platform.

“Whenever we give some sort of metric of what a Republican believes, we go back to these two documents so that there's no question,” he said. “Somebody may not like the documents the way they're written, but they can't argue that I'm just subjectively saying something.”

Underwood prefers to use the term “Constitutional and Platform Republican,” or CPRs for short, when describing the type of values the NEGOP hopes to advance.

“I use that term all the time because then you know exactly who I'm talking about,” he said. “Not right wing, not moderate, not traditional. I don't know which platform they adhere to.”

Underwood credited Kleeb with doing an “excellent job of being a grassroots leader,” but said Democrats today struggle with defining themselves.

“A Democrat is different than it was in the 1960s, the 1980s. It's probably different than it was five years ago,” he said. “The conservative messaging hasn't changed much in two, three decades.”

Kleeb said the Nebraska Democratic Party is about fairness and lifting up middle- and working-class families.

She said helping families build wealth is something the party should have focused on more in 2024.

“We were talking a lot about infrastructure, and obviously that's amazing, and that helps people long term, and helps corporations long term, but that doesn't put money in people's pockets,” she said. “I think that that was a mistake that Democrats did.”

Kleeb said the party needs more forward-thinking ideas to broaden its electorate base.

“We haven't had big ideas as Democrats, really, since FDR,” she said. “We need our own Project 2025 where we are bringing big ideas, new ideas, bold ideas, to the American public, to bring voters who are in the dive bars as well as in the wine bars.”

Legislative goals for 2025

The Nebraska Unicameral is officially nonpartisan and candidates who run for the state legislature do not have a party name next to them on the ballot.

However, partisan fault lines are still evident. In the upcoming session, registered Republicans will make up 33 of the body’s 49 seats. That is just enough for a Republican supermajority, which can override a filibuster with the necessary two-thirds majority.

One defector from party ranks without support from at least one Democrat or independent could indefinitely postpone legislation.

Underwood hopes to change the rules and reduce the threshold to overcome a filibuster down to three fifths.

If adopted, the rules would require 30, instead of 33, votes to end debate and vote on a bill.

“I personally believe that three-fifths is the right number,” he said. “30 out of 49 people should be able to come together and move it through our three voting opportunities, and then it only takes 25 to pass the bill anyway.”

The idea can also be found in the Republican Party’s five-page legislative plan, which was adopted in August this year.

Underwood said he plans to have conversations in the first seven to 10 days of the session to make the rules change.

With only 30 votes necessary, it could be easier to pass several of Gov. Jim Pillen’s legislative priorities in 2025, including legislation to ban transgender girls from girls’ sports and locker rooms in Nebraska schools as well as legislation returning the state to winner-take-all in its electoral vote allocation.

Those proposals were unable to cross the two-thirds threshold in 2024, but they have a clearer path to the governor’s desk if only 30 votes are necessary.

Kleeb criticized Pillen and Republicans for prioritizing trans issues.

“Trans athletes is not a problem facing our state,” she said. “There's basically about one trans athlete that asks for the ability to participate in a team of their opposite gender every year. It's just not a problem. That's a culture issue that the governor just needs to put to the side.”

Instead, Kleeb said she hopes the legislature works on health care, affordable housing, clean energy and helping farmers and ranchers gain access to markets.

She said the state may also need to respond to federal policies enacted during President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming term.

“With the issues of tariffs that we're going to be facing from Donald Trump and the issue of immigration, where we're going to be facing a crisis of workers if Donald Trump goes through with his immigration crisis, then that's something that we in Nebraska are going to have to come up with a solution for,” she said.

The 2025 Nebraska legislative session begins Jan. 8.