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Kara Eastman, who supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, has enjoyed continued support from progressive groups like Justice Democrats.
When the polls finally close on November 3, it will be easy for many to overlook Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, made up of Omaha and its suburbs. Nebraska is in no danger of flipping from Trump to Biden. But a quirk of the Electoral College could give NE-02 outsize importance this year.
Nebraska and Maine are the only two states that do not distribute their electoral votes entirely to the popular-vote winner. Both states award two electoral votes to the candidate that wins the state, and one vote to the winner of each congressional district. President Obama won NE-02 in 2008 while losing the state, and President Trump won Maine’s 2nd District and lost the state in 2016 in an inverse situation. There are plausible electoral maps—for example, taking the 2016 outcome and giving Biden Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, but not Pennsylvania—where the entire presidential election comes down to the result in NE-02.
That means there’s huge importance attached to one congressional district with 439,000 registered voters. And it makes the highly flippable House race here even more critical, not just as a test for whether progressive candidates can drive voter turnout, but for whether progressives and the party establishment can work together in a seat that could literally mean the difference between President Trump and President Biden.
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In that House race, progressive Kara Eastman is squaring off against Republican Don Bacon, now a two-term incumbent who rode in on the Trump coattails in 2016. Polling shows the race is likely to be neck-and-neck; one poll, an internal from the Eastman campaign in early July, found her holding on to a one-point advantage, 50 to 49. An earlier poll conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in May, even before her primary victory, also showed her with a one point, 48-47 advantage. Those results would have her slightly outperforming a district with a +4 Republican lean, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index.
The Sierra Club, an Eastman endorser, has spent just $10 in support of her campaign via their super PAC.
In 2018, Eastman ran against Bacon, and lost narrowly, by just 2 percent. That result was shocking, in part because the DCCC expended most of its energy opposing Eastman in favor of a more conservative, anti-choice candidate in the primary, and then left her for dead in the general, assuming she couldn’t win. They spent only $300,000 on her race, a low figure for a potentially red-to-blue district, leaving it up to a handful of neophyte progressive organizations to boost Eastman’s candidacy. Nearly all of the coverage surrounding the race focused on the “civil war” within the party, between a conservative establishment and its lefty newcomers, and looked to settle the score between those warring factions. With even an average amount of party support, Eastman could’ve won.
This time is supposed to be different. Eastman, who supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, has enjoyed continued support from progressive groups like Justice Democrats and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, as well as establishment Democratic institutions like EMILY’s List and End Citizens United. Eastman even won the coveted seal of approval from the DCCC red-to-blue program, naming her as a top priority challenger, a designation that should ensure significant financial support in the form of independent expenditures. Nimble progressive groups would be able to focus on outreach and ground game, while better-funded institutional groups that had once made Eastman their foe would be able to route significant resources to her campaign. Those two Democratic factions were teaming up, no longer at loggerheads, at least in this one race.
But with just six weeks to go, that super-powered collaboration hasn’t exactly materialized. Groups like Justice Democrats have been phone banking on Eastman’s behalf, while raising money for her campaign. So far, they’ve come up with around $65,000, close to the $72,000 they raised for Missouri’s Cori Bush, but less than the blowout, six-digit fundraising numbers they managed for Jessica Cisneros, Alex Morse, and Jamaal Bowman. Some progressive groups who backed Eastman’s run in 2018, like Indivisible, aren’t formally backing Eastman this time around.
But it’s been the institutional Democratic organizations that have underwhelmed on their end of the bargain. Major national groups support candidates primarily in the form of independent expenditure spending, including expensive television advertising and use of robust, well-established channels to boost name recognition and get out the vote. Yet, according to the most recent Federal Election Commission data, Eastman hasn’t benefited from a significant infusion of outside spending.
So far for the cycle, Eastman’s opponent Don Bacon is currently the beneficiary of over $1.3 million in outside spending from the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Defending Main Street Super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Super PAC historically linked to John Boehner and Paul Ryan, and With Honor Fund, a nominally nonpartisan Super PAC founded in 2018 with a $10 million contribution from Jeff Bezos, which has switched to mostly Republican support (and nothing from the Amazon CEO) in 2020. Bacon has outraised Eastman by some $700,000, and has her beat with an extra $600,000 in cash on hand.
Eastman, meanwhile, hasn’t seen such generosity. Democratic figureheads like Barack Obama and Joe Biden have endorsed her, but the DCCC has only spent $655,000 on her behalf. That’s double what they spent last cycle, but not a significant sum for a red-to-blue race. In New York’s 22nd District, which leans Republican by six points and is also a flip target, the DCCC has spent over $1.3 million. They’ve spent far more in districts both more Republican and more Democratic, including $3.5 million in CA-25, a political tossup, and $1.2 million in North Carolina’s 9th District, which leans Republican by 8 points.
UPDATE: A spokesperson for the DCCC, who contacted the Prospect after publication, said that, outside of the independent expenditure realm, they have contributed to field organizing, investment in hybrid advertising, and poll splits, as well as another $100,000 in statutorily limited spending that allows them to help pay campaign bills. In all, the DCCC “is spending nearly $800K in coordinated side dollars,” in addition to the IE. That includes salaries for staff and other money budgeted for the campaign.
Other major Democratic-aligned institutions have been even less lavish. The Sierra Club, an Eastman endorser, has spent just $10 in support of her campaign via their super PAC. EMILY’s List has donated $15,000, and despite a major independent expenditure arm, has not made any major IE commitments.
In the absence of recent polling that might indicate that the district is already locked up, the lack of investment in Eastman’s race confounds. Because of its electoral vote, the district represents a double-or-nothing situation for Democrats: if Eastman triumphs, it’s likely Joe Biden, too, will win an extra electoral vote. Almost no other single congressional district in the country offers this kind of opportunity.
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance in NE-02 is instructive. She underperformed basically everywhere in her presidential run, but put up a surprisingly spirited fight there, losing to Trump by just 2 percent. That’s the same spread Eastman had in her loss to Bacon. Activating more Democrats in this district could pay dividends at the congressional and presidential levels.
It does appear that the Biden campaign is taking the NE-02 opportunity seriously. On Saturday, Kamala Harris and her husband will travel to the Omaha suburb of Papillion for a listening session with Nebraska veterans, where they will encourage the return of mail-in ballots that will arrive in households next week. But this makes the DCCC’s lack of support for Eastman all the more conspicuous.
Of course, there is still time for any of these groups to increase spending on Eastman’s behalf. It’s possible, too, that progressive groups will pick up some of the slack again, and commit to their own ad buys, as they have done in a handful of races in the past few months. Eastman’s is one of a handful of races across the country where progressives can win contested seats in the general election. But the war chest of Justice Dems and its allies pales in comparison to that of the DCCC and its adjacent institutions, not to mention Joe Biden’s significant fundraising haul.
Making inroads in the midwest has proven to be quite a challenge for Democrats. The GOP has dominated Nebraska at all levels of government for years. But winning in Omaha, an urban district that’s more likely to bend towards Democrats than its rural surrounds, could not only prove decisive in November for moderates and progressives alike, it could also give the party a toehold for the future, and a chance to break the GOP stranglehold on the heartland. Not to mention that it could make Joe Biden president. Given that backdrop, and this year’s emphasis on party unity, supporting Kara Eastman would seem to be a no-brainer. Where is the cavalry?
