Pete Ricketts Wins Nebraska Senate Race, Beating Independent Dan Osborn

Pete Ricketts has won the race for the United States Senate in Nebraska. The Associated Press called the race for the Republican incumbent, and Decision Desk HQ made its own call at 1:34 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, November 4. The result gives Ricketts his first full Senate term and holds the seat for Republicans on a hard night for their party elsewhere.

In the AP snapshot read on Wednesday, Ricketts had 356,858 votes and independent Dan Osborn had 312,179 votes, with 1,147 of 1,322 precincts reporting, which is 86.76 percent, and an estimated 86.81 percent of the vote counted. Decision Desk HQ, in a snapshot at 1:50 a.m. Eastern, had Ricketts at 301,644 votes, or 49.54 percent, and Osborn at 271,357 votes, or 44.57 percent, with 608,888 votes counted. Decision Desk HQ listed Ricketts as the winner by 5.36 percent with 88 percent of the vote in. The counts are unofficial snapshots and will change as the remaining ballots are tallied.

A bright spot on a brutal night

The Washington Sun called the win a bright spot for Republicans on a brutal night for their party. Ricketts spoke to a crowd in Bellevue on Election Day. "They want to tear down this country and rebuild it into something completely different. Folks, they have a radical vision for this country. But tonight we showed them: it stops here in Nebraska," he said, as quoted by the Washington Sun.

The campaign against an independent

Osborn ran as an independent and pledged not to caucus with either party if he reached Washington. Ricketts portrayed him as "Democrat Dan," a label meant to cut into that pledge. President Donald Trump called Osborn a fake independent and visited Nebraska to rally support for Ricketts in the final weeks of the campaign. Vice President JD Vance also rallied in the state in late October.

Republican strategist Ryan Horn, who is based in Nebraska, said before Election Day that the race had become a lot closer than it ever should have been. "That is almost certainly attributable to the unpopularity of the president and the economic difficulty," Horn told the Washington Sun.

Money and the road to a full term

Until October, when the Senate Leadership Fund announced an additional 8 million dollars for Ricketts' campaign, the senator had largely funded his own campaign. More than half of the 14 million dollars his campaign raised since the beginning of the cycle came from Ricketts himself, according to the Washington Sun, citing Bloomberg and Nebraska Examiner reporting.

Ricketts was appointed by the Nebraska governor to fill the seat in 2023, after Senator Ben Sasse stepped down. He won a special election in 2024 for the rest of the six-year term. This was his first election to a full term of his own, and he has now won it.