31st Street Monthly Mtng - Feb 22 2026 - Nebraska - Strategy to Flip Senate Seat [18:04-23:08]

with one-house strategies. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for having me today. I'm going to go ahead and turn on my slides and share my screen and let me know once I get that shared, you should be able to see this now but let me know if you have any issues seeing it and also try to keep an eye on the chat but would love if folks maybe Jim if you wanted to lift up anything that pops up in the chat. Again, my name is Adele Burke and I am the senior director of initiatives at one-house strategies. One-house strategy is a firm that does consulting in Nebraska around political campaigns. So we run campaigns for a number of different candidates. Those include federal, state, and local candidates. We have a team of about 10 professionals with over 50 years of experience total. But I've personally worked in Nebraska politics for nearly 15 years. That experience has included running state legislative and mayoral races and also leading policy for our local plain-parent head affiliate in Nebraska. So I am excited to share what Jim teed up. The program we're launching this year to make the case to voters that they should fire Senator Pete Ricketts in November. So before I get into the meat of the program itself, I wanted to share a few disclaimers about the information they'll be sharing and kind of the specific program that I'll be talking about. So there will be two different accountability programs sort of running side-by-side. Yeah, I can try to speak up a little bit. And there's going to be a 501C-3 program as well as a 501C-4 program. The 501C-3 program will be focusing on educating the brascans about Senator Ricketts votes and Senator Ricketts keep positions. And then by contrast, the 501C-4 program will be making the case to voters directly that they should fire Ricketts in November. So what we're going to be talking about today is specifically the 501C-4 program because we can talk a little bit more about the specifics of the electoral dynamics of that program. And I also wanted to give a little disclaimer that for the 501C-4 program, the Nebraska donor alliance doesn't accept your marked contribution specific to that program, but I'm going to be describing a program that is a very large priority for the Nebraska donor alliance. So getting into the meat of the program itself, wanted to share a little bit about Pete Ricketts and who he is, how we think we can build the case to voters to fire Pete Ricketts in November. He has been an influential figure in Nebraska for about two decades. His family is a family of billionaires. They own TD Ameritrade. So Ricketts ran successfully for the US Senate in 2006. And then ran for governor and served as governor from 2015 to 2023 when he was term limited. Then he immediately basically bought the election of his successor, current governor Jim Pillen. Governor Jim Pillen once elected turned around and appointed Pete Ricketts to our vacant Senate seat. So you can kind of see the corruption and grift that is happening with this dynamic. And Ricketts was elected to serve a full term in his Senate seat in a special election in 2024. So what we know already is that Pete Ricketts is pretty unpopular with Nebraska's. We have polling that shows he is at about 43% approval in Nebraska. And that's statewide and that's including all partisan registrations. So we know that there's a lot of reason that Nebraska's have to dislike him. But we also believe that there are a lot of issues that Nebraska's may not already know about Pete Ricketts and provide some additional room, especially amongst more moderate and conservative audiences to continue to push against him. One of these is again his financial background and his his identity as someone who is wealthy connected with corporations. And Ricketts own personal network is actually in the hundreds of millions and his families in the billions. He's used his wealth to put his thumb on the