As an Army veteran who served as an emergency room medic in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, Omaha resident Katy Eilers will have veterans’ care at the top of her priorities list as she casts her vote this November for a new U.S. House representative for Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District.
“What I care about is who’s gonna listen to me, whether they’re in my party or not,” she said.
Eilers’ stance is characteristic of independent-minded voters in the Omaha-based 2nd District, colloquially named Nebraska’s “Blue Dot” for its support in recent years of Democratic presidential candidates in an otherwise deeply red state. The district is uniquely positioned as the most Democratic-leaning in the nation to have elected a Republican — Rep. Don Bacon — to the U.S. House.
Bacon opted not to seek a sixth term this year after a decade in office. That has Democrats and Republicans scrambling to lay claim to the seat in a midterm election that will decide control of a nearly evenly split Congress.
Seeking to replace Bacon are fellow Republican and Omaha City Councilman Brinker Harding and a political newcomer, Democrat Denise Powell. Libertarian Eric Michael Foreman is also running. They’re vying to win one of the most competitive congressional seats in America.
The 2nd District was one of only three in the country where a majority of voters supported Democrat Kamala Harris for president in 2024 while also sending a Republican to Congress. That goes against the trend of districts voting consistently with presidential performance, making Nebraska’s 2nd District an outlier.
The Omaha-area district’s margin of victory was the widest, with Harris winning by 4.6 percentage points in a state that supported President Donald Trump by nearly 20 percentage points overall. The other two blue districts with Republican congressmen are in New York and Pennsylvania and saw Harris edge Trump by just a fraction of a percentage point.
Nebraska’s 2nd District also swung to former President Joe Biden in 2020 while sending Bacon back to Washington. In 2008, Omaha-area voters backed former President Barack Obama while also re-electing then-Republican Rep. Lee Terry.
“Nebraska’s 2nd District is the bluest district in the U.S. held by any Republican,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which has listed the Omaha district as leaning Democratic in the November election. The Cook Political Report also has the 2nd District House race leaning Democratic.
But those prognosticators have gotten it wrong before. Kondik acknowledged that Crystal Ball wrongly predicted in the last congressional election that Democrat Tony Vargas would unseat Bacon. Bacon instead eked out a win by less than 2 percentage points, continuing a trend of tight election outcomes in the district. It’s proof that election play-calling in Nebraska’s Blue Dot is no easy feat, Kondik said.
Bacon was able to hold on to the seat by taking a more centrist position in a Congress that has grown profoundly partisan in recent election cycles. Bacon — who has gained national attention by publicly criticizing some of President Donald Trump’s policies — blamed that partisanship, in part, for his decision not to seek re-election.
But Democrats suggest it’s also likely that he feared defeat at the ballot box this year following his unpopular vote backing a Republican budget bill that slashed Medicaid funding by more than $500 billion over the next 10 years and ended popular pandemic-era health care insurance subsidies, sending many households’ premiums soaring.
Even so, a long-term incumbent usually carries more weight in elections.
“I think if Bacon were running again, we probably would have this race as a toss-up,” Kondik said. “I think, generally speaking, you’d rather have an incumbent in a seat like this — particularly one who’s been a pretty good electoral performer like Bacon.”
Crystal Ball is relying on a number of factors that it believes make the Omaha district ripe to flip this election. They include the slim margins of victory in recent years, polls showing low approval ratings for Trump and his policies — including tariffs and the Iran war — and various special and statewide elections across the country in the last year in which Democrats have overperformed.
There’s also been a recent swing in local Omaha politics, with Democrat John Ewing ousting longtime incumbent Republican Jean Stothert as mayor last year.
Much of the 2nd District’s swing status can be attributed to its closely divided voter makeup. While the district overall has migrated slightly left in the last two decades, registered Republicans still hold an advantage, with 37.6% of the electorate to Democrats’ 34.1%.
But that leaves nearly 30% of registered voters who are either independent or third-party voters, making that group highly sought after by the candidates.
Former Republican Omaha Mayor Hal Daub, who represented the 2nd District in Congress in the 1980s, is confident 2nd District voters will send Harding to Washington this election, but he agreed that the candidates’ need to appeal to independent voters can’t be overstated.
Nebraska’s history of prairie populism, which champions struggling family farms and the working class, still influences voters in the 2nd District to prioritize individuals over political parties, he said.
“There is still this principle that ‘I vote for the person, not for the party,’” Daub said. “And I think that tends to fertilize the more independent nature of the district.”
The 2nd District race’s frontrunners, Harding and Powell, are well aware of the need to draw independent voters. While the main candidates for statewide races, such as governor and the U.S. Senate matchup, have aggressively gone on the attack against their opponents and strongly sided with or against Trump, Powell and Harding have made a concerted effort to appeal to voters across party lines. Both have made affordability a centerpiece of their platforms, and both have vowed to back restricting the ability of congressional members to trade stocks.
Both candidates’ national parties have also jumped in the battle for the seat. The House Republicans’ main super PAC, Congressional Leadership Fund, announced earlier this year that it had reserved $2.2 million in political advertising time for the 2026 general election, with more to come as the election nears. House Speaker Mike Johnson came to Omaha this summer to campaign for Harding and made clear to supporters how important the 2nd District is in the midterms.
“Nebraska’s 2nd District is key to us holding the majority,” Johnson said.
But Democrats aren’t letting their best opportunity in a decade to flip the seat slip by unchallenged. The party’s main House super PAC, House Majority PAC, announced in April nearly $3 million in campaign ad buys for the general election in hopes of electing Powell.
Eilers, the veterans advocate, is a registered Democrat, but has crossed party lines before to vote for Republicans. That includes Bacon, whom she voted for because he was an Air Force veteran. But she doesn’t think he has taken her concerns about operating policies at Omaha’s VA hospital seriously.
This year, none of the House candidates has her full-throated support. She’s reluctantly voting for Powell, as she says Powell has shown some concern over a January report by the Veterans Affairs Department’s inspector general that substantiated some of Eilers’ complaints about the hospital’s care of mental health patients. She also hopes Democratic control of Congress could help with other concerns she has.
“Affordability, healthcare, pushing back against ICE, you know, getting President Trump under control, ending this illegal war in Iran; like, just all of it,” she said. “I think those things matter to most people in Omaha.”
Daub said he thinks Harding’s deep Omaha roots going back four generations and his extensive work on Omaha development projects – from the downtown CHI Health Center to the West Dodge Expressway and eastern Omaha streetcar project currently under construction – give him a significant advantage at the polls.
“It’s well known that if you wanted to get anything done in this town, Brinker was the go-to council member to get advice and direction and to get things done,” Daub said. “And he’d give it to you, regardless of your party.”
13 Comments
Ouch, another disappointing Flatwater article, in more ways than one.
Firstly, it commits the usual Flatwater errors. An over emphasis on Omaha being the obvious one up front. But worse yet the anecdotal story telling. They immediately kick off the article with the life story of a single person. They aren’t a noteworthy public figure and their very specific backstory is not likely to be representative of a large sample of people living in Omaha (working at a prison in another country that closed over a decade ago). So why was this person even interviewed, much less featured so prominently in this article? Perhaps this was the only person willing to risk talking to a Flatwater reporter?
And the “veteran” angle… listen, I served in the military too. I know that as a nation we try to display our patriotism by taking pride in our military and giving some degree of deference to veterans. But as a veteran myself, I find it kind of pandering to act as if someone has a more valid political opinion just because they are a veteran. This isn’t the movie Starship Troopers, it’s the real world, and I’ve known plenty of people during my time in the military whom I would never listen to on any political topic (and thats putting it about as politely as a possibly can).
Don Bacon is actually a great example of that. The guy has spent his entire political career riding the “but I was a general in the military” angle as if that makes him smarter than the rest of us. Yet his political takes are among the worst I’ve ever seen. If pulling the veteran card is all a person can offer, then that is actually a great reason not to trust their political views, which ironically seems to be the ultimate message of this article (though I doubt that was the actual intention).
you are complain that an article about NE 2 is focused on Omaha. How much of NE 2 is outside Omaha or the more correctly the Omaha Metro?
That is a mischaracterization of what I said. My ongoing concern with all Flatwater articles is that they too frequently talk about Omaha while neglecting the rest of Nebraska, and on the rare occasion when an article is written about a place outside of Omaha the topic receives an obvious political slant that favors the sort of perspective a person from Omaha would be likely to have, rather than the perspective of actual local citizens.
For example, the article bemoaning the new cattle facility in western Nebraska not because of the complaints the local residents provided, but because cows farting too much was allegedly going to cause “climate change.”
Which is also in addition to all the other criticisms of Flatwater that I have provided, both in this comment section and on other articles in the past. The list is quite long, so I try not to bombard you with it all at once.
I think the city of Omaha is about 85 percet of the voters. nI might be off a vit but will check.
Hi, it’s Flatwater editor Matthew Hansen, with a brief point of fact: We published six stories this week. In reverse chronological order, they come from Osmond, outside of Lincoln (featuring prairies across the state, including in the Sandhills), from small counties around the state distributing opioid money, Omaha, Kearney and (today) Wilber. One of our six stories this week came from Omaha. Four or five, depending on how you count it, came from Greater Nebraska.
I’m obviously not going to convince our No. 1 anonymous super fan that narrative is often a good thing — that since the dawn of the storytelling, most people connect to stories featuring the hopes, dreams and fears, the trials and tribulations, of fellow humans. That’s fine. Agree to disagree. And thank you for reading every story we write. I appreciate it.
But this over-emphasis on Omaha thing is provably false. I welcome you to count back a year, or five years. We do.
Again, you blatantly misrepresented what I said.
Stories from Omaha are frequent (and MUCH more frequent than you are admitting), but even when stories are published from outside Omaha, they are slanted with a political bias that obviously favors the Omaha, either by presenting the story in light of how it effects Omaha, or by simply assuming a far-left wing political bent that is clearly driven from Omaha political circles.
For example, in your article where you claimed that public school teachers are quitting their jobs to become yoga teachers (May 20th), myself another other critics pointed out that the data you attempted to cite was primarily related to schools in Omaha, even though you attempted to spin the story as being an overwhelming statewide problem.
Similarly, many of those “greater Nebraska” stories you are bragging on are not delivered in a way that actual residents of those places would agree with them. Again, I point to the repeated attempt to use every environmental issue you discover in any random corner of Nebraska as proof of the “climate change” boogey man. Small towns may care about their economy or about a very smelly feedlot, but they aren’t sitting around hoping that the pope puts his blessing on a block of ice again any time soon.
But I am shocked you even responded to one of my criticisms. You usually just grumble about how my “anonymous” status makes me wrong by default, even though you yourself decided to establish a comment section where anyone can (and often anyone does) provide fake names. Or do did you think that former president Joe Biden really enjoys commenting on your articles?
Super Fan: It’s truly odd how one could read your multiple comments on Omaha-Lincoln stories v. outstate stories, (and they’ve been consistent), and come away with the [mis]understanding as Mr. Hansen did. I must concede that Mr. Hansen did respond to his own strawman quite well, but it’s still a strawman. I would add that it’s often what FFP chooses to ignore, as to what it chooses to publish, that presents the biggest obstacle for FFP to be what it could be.
It’s at the point where FFP needs an ombudsman or a “public editor” to hold FFP accountable for its biased coverage. God bless FFP for trying, but they (FFP authors, editors, and publishers) appear to live in a concrete chamber of echoes as to what journalism in NE should be.
I volunteer.
P.S. I thought that I was FFP’s #1 super fan, but I’m just the bridesmaid apparently.
The allegation that I’m the super fan was based on the presumption that I read every article. I don’t actually read every article, as the ones that are obviously Reader’s Digest material I simply completely skip over these days. If I see another one about guys with man buns playing frisbee again, I might be forced to read it just to vent my anger, but other than that I’m going to make a point to skip the “featured stories” (when I can clearly tell thats what they are). And I skip the “sponsored stories” too, since they tend to either be shallow advertisements or propaganda so blatant even Flatwater won’t deny getting paid to post it.
I could have argued with him about how his allegation that I read every article was wrong, but honestly, everything he said was so deeply wrong it was tough to choose where to even begin. I was tempted to go back into the Flatwater archives and start making a count of every article they have published this year to show him the numbers on how many articles make various errors I’ve pointed out. But it just wasn’t worth my valuable time on such a nice weekend to waste it explaining to someone with an obviously closed mind why his articles are tone deaf toward anyone outside one city, and perhaps half of one other.
On top of everything else, I thought of something else when looking at these remarks again today: How do we even know that was the real “Matthew Hansen” anyway? Technically speaking, since anyone can type any name they want into the box, anyone at all could have written that comment! Seems strange that a guy so concerned about “anonymous” internet posters chooses to operate a website where it’s possible to pretend to be anybody you want.
Didn’t know Brinker was a Daub disciple, knowing that I will certainly be voting for Denise in the Fall. This town hates Daub and the good ole boy network he is a part of.
Looking at the ###s for the 2022 general, Douglas county was 82% of the vote. Omaha’s obviously a subset of that, probably 70% of the district total?
Regardless, this was a solid article. Ms. Beck knows the district well having covered races there for years for AP.
Pierre B. says that Congressman Bacon’s “political takes are among the worst I’ve ever seen”! But doesn’t indicate what those “takes” are that he disagrees with. And Congressman Bacon does NOT base his political career on merely being a General! A lengthy commentary by Pierre that actually says absolutely nothng!
To quote the article itself: “That includes Bacon, whom she voted for because he was an Air Force veteran.” So as I said, thats all he ever had going for him, even per the people who foolishly voted for him.
As for which takes he has that are bad: Literally all of them.
He is dropping out of politics because even he was smart enough to realize the jig is up for him. He spent his political career trying to play enlightened centrist and in so doing alienated his own Republican base, while failing to win over enough Democrats to stay in the game. So rather than embarrass himself by running again and losing, he is trying to save face by acting like he is taking the ball and going home with it. It’s probably the only smart move he ever made in life, but still only half-smart at that.
You didn’t say a single thing to defend the guy, likely because there isn’t anything to say that would defend him. Some people just pretend to like him because he is trying to spite Trump on his way out the door, but that doesn’t mean you actually like Don Bacon, you just hate Trump enough to pretend you do.
The population of District 2, according to the internet (if you believe those stats) is about 34% of the population of Nebraska.
In the 2022 mid-terms, approximately 663,187 people voted in Nebraska, of which about 219,470 were in District 2, the Blue dot, or about 33%. So about 1 out of 3 of the Nebraska votes come from the 2nd District. (If my figures are wrong, blame the internet. I do, all the time.)
Nice article, Marjery (no relation).