Politico: “Nebraska’s been lucky so far. It’s largely ducked the ugly intraparty feuding that’s consumed the GOP in Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere in the post-Trump era. Donald Trump won big in Nebraska, one of the nation’s most rock-ribbed Republican states. But so did Sen. Ben Sasse, one of his fiercest critics, who pulled more votes statewide than the former president in November. The state party rebuked Sasse following his vote to impeach Trump, but it stopped short of taking the next step – censuring him. Other Republicans with moderately conservative profiles have fared well, too. Rep. Don Bacon, who supported Trump but criticized his rhetoric, out-performed Trump in his Omaha-based congressional district in November.”
“But if the state stands out as a petri dish of divergent strains of conservatism, the Republican primary for governor in 2022 is poised to test the limits of their peaceful co-existence. The question in Nebraska – as it is in other heavily Republican swaths of the country – isn’t if a Republican must be supportive of Trump to win an open statewide office. They almost certainly must be. It’s whether just supporting Trump is good enough – or if, in the reddest of states in the new GOP, only the Trumpiest candidate can win. In Nebraska, that means whether any institutionalist Republican – even a pro-Trump one – can beat Charles Herbster, the wealthy rancher and friend of Trump who not only supported him, but went so far as to attend the Jan. 6 rally in Washington that preceded the riot at the Capitol. In a field that may include one former governor and several other mainstream Republicans, said Ryan Horn, a Republican media strategist based in Omaha, ‘The problem is you get four or five people running and they all divide up the vote, and the chest-thumper has a floor of 20 or 25 percent, maybe, saying, ‘They’re all a bunch of pussy communists,’ and then Trump endorses him.’ He said, ‘You’re going to get a really good case study of just how much can a Donald Trump endorsement standing alone in a Republican state do for somebody.'”