Francis Gardler/Lincoln Journal Star via AP
Trump rally at the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln, January 6, 2021
Rewind to two decades ago, when centrist Democrats like Ben Nelson and Bob Kerrey were the party’s standard-bearers in the Nebraska governor’s office and in the Senate. Since then, declining union influence, in-state infighting, and the national party’s lack of interest in developing new leaders in hard-to-win states have eroded the party’s fortunes beyond recognition. The steady coarsening of the national dialogue helped catapult this bastion of Midwestern cultural conservatism into a deep-red zone where Donald Trump crushed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts took a hard line against the immigrants keeping the state’s meatpacking plants in business, and a Republican who attended the January 6 rally before the Capitol insurrection now runs for governor.
In Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold, independent journalist Ross Benes, a native of Brainard, Nebraska, now living in New York, explains how the rewiring of the Cornhusker mindset exemplifies the enmity between rural and urban Americans, and why the state’s ethos of self-reliance and small-community resilience that confounds outsiders doesn’t always sync up with red-state, anti-government dogma.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Gabrielle Gurley: What has the pandemic meant for the partisan politics in Nebraska and attitudes toward government in general?
Ross Benes: In the early stages of the pandemic, Gov. Pete Ricketts was very much of the view of “Let’s just see where this goes.” The Omaha City Council was going to pass a mask ordinance to try to be proactive about this—and the governor threatened to sue the council. He’s taken a far-right Republican stance of, We can’t tell anyone what to do, even if that may save lives. He’s targeted meatpacking workers. The most asinine statement that I’ve seen come out in Nebraska during the pandemic was Gov. Ricketts’s comment about illegal immigrants working at meatpacking plants not being eligible for the vaccine. He walked it back after he was criticized. When workers were protesting and they were threatening to shut down [meatpacking plants], he was very involved behind the scenes in keeping plants running and shutting down debate in the legislature over providing more protections for those workers.
The pandemic definitely ripped through and devastated some of these small towns, but I still hear people make excuses. My parents got COVID and were terribly sick. It really woke up my parents to the severity of the situation. But on Facebook and in conversations, I still hear people say, “Well, sure, Riley’s grandfather died of COVID, but you know he was already sick, he was gonna die anyways.”
Ricketts is term-limited, and the 2022 governor’s race is going to be wide open. Sen. Deb Fischer finally announced that she is not running. What’s your sense of where Nebraska is headed?
Rep. Don Bacon, the Republican congressman from Omaha, has flirted with the idea of running, too. There’ll probably be half a dozen candidates when it’s all said and done. One of the most popular ones is Charles Herbster. He was in Washington, D.C., at the Trump rally on January 6, and at Mar-a-Lago the day before. Normally, that should sink him, but I don’t think it will, unfortunately. If there are two or three who are less crazy, they split the majority and someone who is considered a third- or a fourth-place candidate rises. That’s how Ricketts won. So I suspect you’ll get a crowded primary and someone who is not the favorite will win.
Sen. Ben Sasse voted to impeach Trump: What has that done to his standing?
He is trying to position himself as the leader of the non-Trump part of the Republican Party. But he still voted for Trump almost every time he could. There were going to be times when they would just naturally align. But there were other times when he did the president’s bidding while it was convenient, when he would vote for a Trump position such as the border wall. Then when Trump was already going to be gone, that’s when he voted to impeach him. Several state GOP county chairs in Nebraska censured him.
Last year, former state Rep. Ernie Chambers told The American Prospect: “There’s a thick cloud of backwardness hanging around the entire state.” What do you make of that statement?
I tried to interview Ernie Chambers several times and he rebuffed my request. What I’ll say about Ernie, who is the most famous state lawmaker, probably in Nebraska history, is he likes to say things to get a reaction from people. He has sued God, he’s called the police ISIS. He is a genius, but he likes to provoke people. But even in Ernie’s own career, he’s gotten lawmakers from both parties to help him pass things to improve people’s lives or to take a moral stand against racism. One of the biggest things he’s known for is getting Nebraska to cut ties with South African businesses during apartheid. In Nebraska, most grocery purchases are not taxed. Chambers was behind that; he said that grocery taxes are regressive taxes, they are more likely to affect the poor, more likely to affect minorities, so we should get rid of this. And Ernie got the legislature to do it.
With the recent meatpacking controversies, what’s your sense of how white Nebraskans view these jobs and the people doing them?
There’s so much talk about that: Why is Excel Beef Packing recruiting them; why don’t [white] people want those jobs? Those root economic causes that bring those companies to recruit foreign labor aren’t discussed. They take their frustration with one thing and blame it on the immigrants. Take a guy who used to work at one of those plants, but now can’t get a job with his high school degree. There’s no such thing as a pension for him anymore. Instead of being mad at the corporation, it’s at immigrants who are coming here. That sentiment has just driven the Republican Party further to the right, and Republican candidates who have parked on that have been effective. Pete Ricketts wasn’t an anti-immigrant politician when he ran the first time. He ran against Ben Nelson for Senate and he was actually pretty pragmatic.
What does the rest of the country get wrong about Nebraska’s rural residents?
They are very conservative, that’s true, but just because they’re very conservative, it doesn’t mean that they will, by default, support everything Republicans support. Nebraskans have shown that they will provide some working-class protections, but it has to be done through a nonpartisan means, whether it’s our nonpartisan legislature or through a ballot initiative. Even though they vote for Republicans who oppose minimum wage, they voted to increase the minimum wage, cap payday loan interest rates, and expand Medicaid. This idea that’s been floated in the past that they’ll just blindly follow corporate plutocrats who fund the Republican Party—it’s more nuanced than that.
What distinguishes Nebraska from the Dakotas, Missouri, and the other surrounding states?
We used to send Democrats to Congress and to the governor’s [office] and we don’t anymore. That same thing has happened in Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Voter registration [and] the racial makeup in those states tends to be pretty similar. But the states around here have voter ID laws, while Nebraska doesn’t have those. They’ve been repeatedly shot down in the legislature, whenever Republicans have tried to push that through. Not every Republican in that chamber is going to be as loyal to the party, as they are in Kansas or Iowa. Also, the Keystone XL pipeline was blocked, and a big part of that was by activism that occurred in Nebraska.
How would you break down the attitudes toward urban areas?
There’s definitely strong skepticism that turns to distrust toward cities, especially cities that are very large and outside the state. People in Brainard don’t necessarily hate Omaha, but New York City is like Sodom and Gomorrah to them. It’s frustrating. Because they’re very religious, they’ll just chalk it up to sinful behavior. You live with your significant other before you’re married? Oh, that’s sinful. They may not consider that’s because your rent costs two grand there.
It’s easy to displace that frustration onto someone without realizing that in New York, most people are just thinking about how they’re going to pay their rent, send their kid to school, and whatnot. [Many Nebraskans] haven’t spent a lot of time in a city, so they view it as the government’s taking care of people, the government’s doing this thing and that thing for them—without considering if the government actually is.
Did the floods of 2019 change how people view relationships with government?
You saw a lot of people helping their neighbors and risking their lives to protect people—and that included government workers and the National Guard. My sense is that it just reinforced people’s love for self-reliance in the community, aside from the military. The military is like a golden god in these areas. But that’s the government; it’s not a private enterprise. If there is a pro-government sentiment that comes from that type of situation, it just makes those people love the National Guard more, but it doesn’t help them with other things that they may view as bureaucracy that’s imposing on their lives, even if it is trying to help them.
What about the Postal Service meltdown last year?
That was a complete fuck-up for Trump. People love the post office. If I was to deliver a package by FedEx to Brainard, it would cost so much money to get them to go out there. If everything is closed down in a small town, the post office is one of the few places where you are going to hang out and talk to people.
I will say this about government in Nebraska: If it is part of people’s lives already, they don’t protest it as much as a new initiative. Nebraska is the only state with 100 percent public electric power. They don’t say, “Oh, that’s big government; why don’t we bring in something like Con Edison.” They say, “That’s how we do power here.” Same with Social Security, public education, or the post office. But if the government tries to pass the Affordable Care Act or the Green New Deal, oh my god.
Nebraskans resent liberals who claim that rural people vote against their own interests. Do you see a way out of the wilderness for Nebraska Democrats?
In rural areas, what has driven partisanship is perception of government. It’s frustrating because rural areas tend to receive more government investment per capita than urban areas. There’s a huge cost to schools and roads if you have few people spread out over great distances. They definitely are receiving a lot of government help already; otherwise, their towns would not exist.
I don’t see the Democratic Party coming back in the near term, not on a statewide basis. Their best chance is to win some big races in Omaha, build some momentum, and get people excited about running again and donating to the party. You need to win in those cities more regularly before you become competitive statewide, because the cities are the best bet. Right now, Omaha has a Republican mayor and a Republican congressman, and until they can change that, I don’t see any momentum for the rest of the state. It only gets more uphill, the further you drive away from Omaha.
Omaha is very corporate and is still very much a business center. Business-friendly Democrats tend to do well and get the backing of the business community. Somebody who is business-friendly might do bad shit, like provide tax cuts to corporations that don’t need them. But that’s the candidate that realistically has a chance. As annoying as someone like Joe Manchin may be, someone like him probably has a better shot in Omaha than someone who is advocating strongly for Medicare for All, defunding the police, or being very vocal about abortion rights.
It’s kind of crazy that Joe Biden won Omaha, though he’s been a centrist for most of his career. Omaha is more conservative than most cities are; a candidate who is further to the left just isn’t going to do well there.
