Will Nebraska Democrats Make History in 2026?
No state has gone back-to-back cycles without a Democratic candidate on a U.S. Senate ballot
Independent mechanic and former national guardsman and union president Dan Osborn announced his 2026 election plans earlier this week: seeking a U.S. Senate seat in Nebraska for a second consecutive cycle.
On the heels of his record-setting 2024 performance against GOP Senator Deb Fischer last November, Osborn is now poised to take on incumbent Republican Pete Ricketts.
Osborn received 46.5 percent of the vote in 2024 with Nebraska Democrats choosing not to field a nominee in a U.S. Senate election for the first time in the primary era out of 43 general and special elections. In fact, it was the first time both major parties in the Cornhusker State did not field a nominee in a U.S. Senate contest during the direct election era.
Nebraska Democrats are already on record stating they will not back a candidate against Osborn next year, though a non-endorsed candidate could still file and win the August 13, 2026 primary.
To be sure, Osborn would need every Democratic vote he can get to pull off an upset of Ricketts, and would clearly benefit from not having a Democratic Party nominee on the ballot again in 2026.
If that happens, Nebraska would make the record books – marking the first time in U.S. history that a state did not have a Democratic Party candidate in a U.S. Senate contest in back-to-back elections.
Of the more than 2,000 U.S. Senate elections conducted since the beginning of the direct election era in 1913, just 154 did not have either a Democratic or a Republican candidate.
In only 34 of these instances was there no stand-alone Democratic nominee. [Note: For states without nominees that conduct jungle primaries (e.g. California, Louisiana, Washington), whether or not a major party candidate was on the ballot was tallied].
For starters, voters across 30 states have always had the choice of a Democratic candidate in every U.S. Senate election: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Of the remaining 20 states, 13 have seen the Democratic Party fail to field a candidate in just one cycle: Oregon (1918 special), Pennsylvania (1922 special), North Dakota (1926 special), Iowa (1926), Arizona (2000), Idaho (2004), Indiana (2006), South Dakota (2010), Alabama (2014), Alaska (2020), Arkansas (2020), Utah (2022), and Nebraska (2024).
That leaves just seven states where Democrats did not produce a stand-alone U.S. Senate candidate in at least two election cycles. Each were separated by at least one cycle in which a Democrat was on the ballot:
- California: 1934, 1940, 1946 (special), 1952 [Note: in 1946’s special election there were no nominees by any party – only write-in candidates]
- Kansas: 2002, 2014
- Minnesota: 1918, 1928, 1936 (special), 1936
- Mississippi: 1990, 2002
- Vermont: 1968, 2006, 2012, 2018, 2024
- Virginia: 1990, 2002
- Wisconsin: 1925 (special), 1928
Wisconsin Democrats did not field a candidate against Progressive Robert La Follette, Jr. three years apart during his blow-out victories in 1925’s special and 1928’s general election, but the party ran Racine attorney and 1914 candidate Thomas Kearney sandwiched in between during the 1926 election in a race won by Governor John Blaine.
Several states, particularly in the Deep South, saw multiple consecutive cycles go by without a Republican U.S. Senate nominee during the early and mid-20th Century.
Since the 2000 cycle, however, it has been much more common for Republican U.S. Senate candidates to run without opposition by a Democratic nominee than the reverse. Democrats have not run a candidate in 18 elections during this span, compared to just four for the GOP.
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– Note: The “Democratic Party” technically ceased to exist in ND starting in 1956, as well as in MN as of 1944. Of course, the newly merged DNPL (Democratic Non Partisan League) and DFL parties have been allied with the national party since – just as the CSU of Bavaria is allied with the CDU of Germany writ large.
– Since 2001, even some of those first elected as Democrats had chosen to re-affiliate themselves as ‘independents’ by the time they left the seats, whether because they came to regard the various diktats spouted by the so-called woke factions of the party as intolerable (e.g. Manchin of WV) or because they lost the primary elections (e.g. Lieberman of CT).
– Osborn has made an arguably wise choice in not contesting a state constitutional post or the CD-02 seat; the state Democrats in all likelihood would not have deferred to him had he made a bid for the aforementioned positions.
It is worthy of note that there had been hardly any ‘independent’ candidates who tried to corral the non-Democratic votes in the “Solid South” states prior to the Republican ascendance throughout the section (commenced first by Eisenhower in the peripheries in 1952 and then Goldwater in the Deep South a dozen years later) the way Osborn, McMullin of UT in ’22, and others had tried to do the reverse in Republican-heavy states since 2001.
Perhaps the most relatively successful – though still losing – recent such case, though not involving a US senate election, is that of “Steve” Poizner, who sought re-election to the post of CA insurance commissioner in 2018. He essentially corralled the baseline Republican vote and showed enough appeal to independents and even some soft Democrats to garner 47.1% of the vote. Had he stood as a Republican (he previously had won as one in 2006) Poizner might have lost by a double-digit margin.