Aaron Sanderford
OMAHA — Making history has become a political habit for Preston Love Jr., the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Nebraska, who is facing U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts, a Republican incumbent.
In 2020, Love became the state’s first Black candidate for the U.S. Senate backed by a major political party after the Nebraska Democratic Party abandoned its nominee, Chris Janicek.
This year, Love became the first Black Nebraskan to win a major party’s Senate nomination. His opponent, Ricketts, is a two-term governor who was appointed to the Senate by his successor.
Love also managed the barrier-breaking presidential campaign of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the mid-1980s, a campaign credited with broadening who Americans might accept as president.
Love has made no bones about the steep climb he faces Tuesday against Ricketts, the political face of one of the most influential donor families in conservative politics nationally.
Love compared his upstart campaign to David in search of a rock to knock off Goliath. He acknowledged that his campaign is at least partially aimed at boosting turnout for other races.
Love wants to boost turnout
Love, who has helped run voter turnout efforts in North Omaha, said he wants his campaign to help motivate poorer voters who too often lose hope in the value of the process.
He said it could make a difference in Nebraska’s 2nd District U.S. House race between Democratic State Sen. Tony Vargas and U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., and in the presidential contest.
“I didn’t really choose the race,” Love told “Picking Corn,” the Nebraska Examiner’s political podcast. “I chose the time to run. If there were others, I would not run and (would) support them.”
His campaign raised $236,000, spent $195,000 and has $41,000 in cash on hand, campaign finance filings show. Ricketts has raised $5.4 million, spent $4.2 million and has $1.2 million in cash.
A separate Pete Ricketts Victory Fund raised $4.5 million and spent $4.4 million, sending much of that money to national Republicans, political committees and Ricketts’ Senate campaign.
Love had support from some small television advertising buys from an outside group tied to local progressives earlier in the campaign. He went on the air more meaningfully this week, he announced on Twitter, or X.
Ricketts aims to win and win again
Ricketts is campaigning like an incumbent who knows he represents a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats 2 to 1 and where nonpartisans make up about a quarter of the electorate.
He is an overwhelming favorite to fill out the final two years of former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse’s term. Ricketts’ spending seems aimed at laying the groundwork to run for a six-year term in 2026.
Ricketts has run waves of television and radio ads focused on national issues, such as U.S. competition with China, national security and fighting bureaucratic overreach in Washington, D.C.
He is barnstorming the state this weekend with other members of Nebraska’s congressional delegation to boost GOP turnout statewide and to help Republicans in key races, including Bacon.
Ricketts has spent much of the campaign telling conservatives he would block the worst spending impulses of President Joe Biden and his potential successor, Vice President Kamala Harris.
He also pledged to be a reliable vote for tax and regulatory cuts sought by former President Donald Trump. He held the state’s purse strings tightly as governor.
Ricketts has a record
On the stump, Ricketts has mainly ignored Love, focusing on what he describes as the missteps of the Biden administration and the need for GOP stewardship of the economy.
He said he still believes, as he did when he ran for governor, that governments benefit from his private sector experience with his father’s company, which became TD Ameritrade.
Ricketts pointed to customer-service-focused improvements in how quickly Nebraskans can access the Supplemental Nutrition Aid Program, or SNAP, which he has also pushed at the federal level.
“Really that’s what we did is we took that business experience to run government more like a business and we improved the level of services we provided,” Ricketts told the Examiner.
Ricketts has emphasized national defense and said the Senate needed a stricter immigration bill than the bipartisan border bill proposed by Oklahoma U.S. Sen. James Lankford.
That bill, which the Border Patrol union called the strongest in a generation, died after Trump intervened. Trump and some of his supporters wanted to avoid giving Biden a win on the issue.
Ricketts is no stranger to controversy. He has angered advocates for people in need and people with disabilities, who say he cares more about costs than people.
He angered some local Latinos by sending members of the Nebraska State Patrol and the Nebraska National Guard to the U.S.-Mexican border to help Texas with enforcement challenges there.
Some in the Nebraska Republican Party have questioned Ricketts’ loyalty to Trump, although he endorsed the former president once it became clear Trump would win the GOP nomination.
However, rank-and-file Republicans did not criticize Ricketts’ state spending on immigration, typically handled by the federal government. Gov. Jim Pillen has continued border deployments.
Love wants change at the top
Love, a longtime civil rights activist, criticized the state’s results from one-party rule. He argues that more competition for people’s votes and voices would better serve Nebraska.
He said people have to go beyond caring about which party wins more from a public stance than finding a compromise policy approach that better solves people’s problems.
But Love said Trump presents unique challenges.
“Trump has become a wedge in our country,” Love said. “So we no longer have the luxury of just having divisions. … And so when do we take a stand? Each of us. … It’s now.”
As he told the Examiner’s podcast, Love studied economics while playing football for Coach Bob Devaney at the University of Nebraska and worked for IBM for over a decade.
He owned a computer store in Atlanta, where he said he met and joined luminaries of the civil rights movement. He still takes people from Nebraska on trips there to experience the past.
He has said he would protect a woman’s right to make her own reproductive health decisions and that he would protect voting rights by passing federal legislation named after the late civil rights leader John Lewis.
He has said economic development needs to be broader and more inclusive, helping communities where private investment sometimes leaves people to fend for themselves or at the whims of nonprofits.
He is open about his past struggles with addiction, saying it helps inform the sensitivities of his rehabilitation-and-treatment-focused approach to drugs he’d like to see adopted.
Abortion and more
Ricketts backed Initiative 434, a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion after the first trimester, with some exceptions. Love supported Initiative 439, an abortion-rights amendment that would add a right to abortion to the Nebraska Constitution until fetal viability, the timing of which would be defined by a treating health care practitioner.
Both candidates stressed the need to fix Congress’ broken budget process, with Ricketts and Love saying the Senate needs to go back to regular appropriations and clearer committee work.
Both said they support U.S. military aid to Israel and Ukraine, though Love stressed the importance of doing more to make sure that innocent Palestinian civilians are protected.
Ricketts said it was important that the U.S. help its allies defend themselves without placing unreasonable limits on how. He said Israel needs full American backing against Hamas.
“Hamas started a war, and wars are horrible,” Ricketts told the podcast. “This is why you don’t start wars.”
They both also backed the need for a focus on improving crop insurance in the next farm bill, which Love said has taken too long for Congress to fix.
Ricketts lost his first Senate race in 2006 to former U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., in what was then the most expensive Senate race in Nebraska history. Nelson beat him 64%-36%.
Ricketts mostly self-financed that campaign and later described his decision as a mistake. He has raised more funds from supporters for his successful gubernatorial bids and his 2024 campaign.