Nebraska & West Virginia Primary Results: Ricketts vs. Osborn Is Set, and Bacon's Seat Is Up for Grabs

Nebraska and West Virginia held primaries on Tuesday, setting up two Senate general-election matchups and clarifying the field in one of Democrats' top House pickup opportunities. The headline: Pete Ricketts will defend his Senate seat against independent Dan Osborn in November — and the Nebraska Democratic Party is openly backing Osborn over their own primary winner.

Nebraska Senate: The Ricketts-Osborn Rematch

The peculiar dynamic in the Democratic primary underscores just how seriously Nebraska Democrats are taking Osborn's candidacy. Cindy Burbank won the Democratic nomination but had publicly said she would consider dropping out if she didn't have a viable path to victory. The state party endorsed Osborn months ago, effectively treating the Democratic primary as a formality.

For Osborn, the math is straightforward but narrow. Nebraska is a deep-red state by any traditional measure. But Ricketts' name recognition cuts both ways — his family's wealth and political dynasty generate as much resentment as loyalty in parts of the state. And Osborn's blue-collar populism, honed during his 2024 campaign against Fischer, gives him a lane that a traditional Democrat couldn't access.

This race isn't on most national forecasters' competitive lists yet. It should be.

NE-02: The Open Seat Democrats Have Been Eyeing for a Decade

NE-02 matters beyond Nebraska. The district includes most of Omaha and has been one of the few reliably competitive seats in the Great Plains. Bacon held it for five terms through a combination of moderate branding and personal popularity, but with him gone, the district's underlying lean — which has favored Democrats at the presidential level in three of the last five cycles — reasserts itself.

The district also carries outsize importance because of Nebraska's unusual electoral vote allocation. Nebraska splits its electoral votes by congressional district, and NE-02 has awarded its single electoral vote to the Democratic presidential candidate twice since 2008. If Democrats win the House seat, it strengthens the argument against switching to winner-take-all — a change Republicans have pursued for years. If Cavanaugh wins and leaves the state legislature, it could give GOP Gov. Pillen the votes to push the change through before 2028.

West Virginia Senate: Capito Holds

West Virginia's Senate race is a foregone conclusion, but the primary was still worth watching for one reason: the sheer number of challengers Capito drew from her right flank. Five Republicans tried to out-Trump the incumbent in a state where loyalty to the former president is table stakes. Capito dispatched them all, which says more about her incumbency advantage than her ideological positioning.

The Bigger Picture

Tuesday's primaries add two more data points to the emerging midterm landscape. The Nebraska Senate race — Ricketts vs. Osborn — is the kind of asymmetric contest that forecasters routinely underestimate until it's too late. Osborn isn't running as a Democrat, which insulates him from the partisan baggage that sinks Democrats in red states. He's running as a union guy from Omaha who nearly beat a sitting Republican senator in a state where that shouldn't be possible.

NE-02 is simpler to evaluate: it's an open seat in a district that leans slightly Democratic at the presidential level, in a year when the national environment strongly favors Democrats. If the party can't flip this one, the House majority is probably out of reach.