31st Street Monthly Mtng - Feb 22 2026 - Nebraska - Strategy to Flip Senate Seat [23:08-28:14]

scale in Nebraska elections in a huge way. So over his time since he was first elected governor, he's donated at least $15 million to his political allies and causes in that timeframe. This has included personally bankrolling campaigns to restore Nebraska's death penalty and implement voter ID and to enshrine an abortion ban in Nebraska state constitution. So between him and his families, well, they've really had a corrupting power and polarize a politicization of Nebraska politics in a way that we have not had as much in the past. Ricketts is also an outspoken opponent of things like medical marijuana that are extremely popular with Nebraska's. But you know, Nebraska is one of about I think three states that has not implemented medical marijuana yet feels kind of wild probably. But we have run into a lot of barriers in the past and a lot of that is due to Pete Ricketts and his wealth stopping measures for medical marijuana from being on the ballot. We did have a measure pass in 2024 with over 70% of the vote. But because of Ricketts and Governor Jim Pillen, that has not been implemented and Nebraska still don't have access. So the idea of these elected officials interfering with the will of the voters is something that is really salient in Nebraska. Ricketts has also taken a lot of unpopular votes and positions with that are unpopular from Nebraska's. So we know the big, beautiful bill cut Medicaid funding. Obviously that impacts a lot of Nebraska family and access to health care. But it also impacts rural hospitals in a way that's really salient with Nebraska's. And then present Trump's tariffs and his continued support of those tariffs is something that I think Nebraska's need to know about and will be really persuasive to them. But you know, these are all things that we expect are going to be persuasive to Nebraska's. What we're going to be doing in the next month is fielding a poll so that we'll know exactly what Nebraska's are most persuaded by in terms of Ricketts background and his votes and other issue positions. So that will inform ultimately the kinds of programming that we do even though we already have a pretty decent intuition about what the types of things we'll focus on will be. And I'll just pause for a second and make sure I don't have any questions that pop up. Adele, I'll be I'm Aaron. I will be logging the questions for you. So when you finish your presentation, then I'll pose them to you. So you can go ahead. Okay, great, perfect. Awesome. Thank you. So talking about the specific tactics that we're using for the program, I wanted to get into a little bit more detail about what specifically we'll be doing. So the majority of the program will be paid media and the goal of paid media is always to reach both the targeted and also an expansive audience sort of simultaneously. We want to reach more conservative and moderate Nebraska's who are likely midterm voters. But we also want to make sure that we are blanketing the state with one consistent message. So the map that you see here on this slide, I hope, is some helpful context for what Nebraska is like in terms of its population density and its partisan registration. So those huge blue dots on the eastern side of the state are Omaha and Lincoln. And then you'll see there's a very sparse population throughout the rest of the state. Omaha and Lincoln are over 50% of the state population. So what we're going to do is obviously do some paid media that is reaching into the Omaha and Lincoln area specifically. So those those TV markets. But then we also want to make sure that we're reaching rural radio. We want to make sure that we're doing targeted digital that reaches people who are conservative and moderate outside of the major metro areas. And then we also are doing targeted mail. So the multiple mail pieces will be targeted at that more moderate conservative audience. And, you know, the great thing about mail is that you can drive home a message consistently to an extremely targeted audience. So it's really, you know, surround sound strategy and as far as getting our message out about Ricketts. What I wanted to show you, besides obviously Jim showed