With the cost of fertilizer and energy inputs surging due to the war on Iran, Nebraska’s farming industry, always squeaking by on the thinnest of margins, is being thoroughly brutalized. The town of Lexington is in free fall amid the closure of a beef processing facility that served as the town’s foundation. And in Omaha, a city where AI severely threatens employees in the primary industry of insurance, anxiety is at an all time high.
It’s not a great time to be a politician who’s the son of a billionaire celebrating the virtues of the free market, but such is the fate of Nebraska’s Republican senator, Pete Ricketts, who faces a surprisingly robust challenge from independent Dan Osborn, a mechanic who rose to prominence in the state leading a strike at a major Kellogg facility.
Ricketts, for his part, also claimed to have drawn a short straw when it came to one of the reporters assigned to this article, Drop Site’s new congressional reporter Julian Andreone. As a college student, Julian excitedly celebrated the launch of Osborn’s campaign, forecasting his victory. If I was Ricketts, I’d complain about Julian covering me too, but now that he’s out of school and working as a reporter, let’s judge him by his work rather than a past tweet.
They’re probably not super excited about my own involvement either, but Ricketts himself may find something valuable in what Julian found during his recent trip to Nebraska, and we present it below with neither fear nor favor, as they say. And we encourage Ricketts himself, of course, to take the same opportunity Osborn availed himself of to answer questions and make his case to voters. As you’ll see from his campaign spokesperson’s comments to us, that’s unlikely to come about, but the door remains open.