31st Street Monthly Mtng - Feb 22 2026 - Nebraska - Strategy to Flip Senate Seat [41:38-46:41]

that I can just say as a, you know, observer of his campaign is that he has shown a little bit more conservative leaning on like law enforcement. So that would be like one specific example where I think he is speaking more to like the conservative Nebraska voice. Great. Another question, what was Ricketts record as governor and why is he so against medical cannabis? Yeah. So Ricketts was basically about as conservative as you can get as governor. He signed into law multiple bills that restricted abortion access. While he was governor, the Nebraska legislature passed a bill very narrowly to repeal the death penalty in our state. And he spent large amounts of money personally investing in the campaign to restore the death penalty in Nebraska. So that's another issue that he was really active on. You know, basically you named the issue, he was super conservative about it, you know, charter schools, all that kind of stuff. And the medical marijuana issue, it's kind of interesting because Pete Ricketts has not only been like opposed to marijuana, but like he's been very kind of like marmish, like weird about it, saying like marijuana will kill your kids, right? So just like these kind of outlandish sounding quotes from from sender Ricketts. And yeah, he's just been consistently opposed to that issue. And you know, he worked basically hand in hand with a local county attorney to challenge multiple attempts to get that issue on the ballot in the past and then blocked it from ballot access. And then, you know, poured money into campaign efforts to stop that, that stop that policy from passing. Great. Thank you. What do Nebraska Republicans think that the current administration is doing right? What do they like? And also, you know, Ricketts is so unpopular. Look, why, what's the popularity of Ricketts and the current administration? What is that based on? Yeah, so I think that there is a really populist streak amongst a lot of Nebraska's, which actually it's been interesting to see how that has aligned with a lot of the way that Dana Osborne has been speaking to Nebraska's, you know, speaking about, and I think Trump appeals to that populist streak, right? He is trying to speak as a, you know, how many other people, right? He's like plain spoken, all this kind of stuff. So like there's some stylistic ways in which I think Nebraska's agree with Trump. I think there's issues around like affordability and immigration and things like that that just really were resonant with Nebraska's in 2024. Maybe they find a little less believable now, but they still, you know, don't want to totally, you know, pivot on Trump. So, you know, Trump is more popular than Ricketts in Nebraska, but the polling that we've seen is not as popular as you would think. So I think compared to 2024, there's a little bit more resistance to Trump based on some of these like tariffs and other things that we've never seen. Right, thanks. Okay, another question that came up, and this is a question both for us at 31st Street, but maybe you can also speak to this as well as there's some concern about like negative campaigning. You know, are we increasingly, you know, why is negative campaigning? So necessary should we be making a more affirmative case? What is the role of negative campaigning in the current environment? Yeah, so what I would say is I don't think that the case for the case against Pete Ricketts relies on anything that's a, you know, a misrepresentation of reality, right? I think it's important that Nebraska's understand that voting for Pete Ricketts is against their interests, and I think because it's a party line vote a lot of times, they don't really realize that what their elected official is doing is not benefiting them. So I think there's a lot of value in simply educating voters about what the votes have been. We also know that that kind of informational, you know, oppositional, I wouldn't say necessarily negative, but like oppositional kind of campaigning is actually effective. And that's why people continue to use it in political spheres. So unfortunately, or fortunately, it is actually pretty effective. Yeah, let me, let me support all that. I mean, we're telling the truth, unlike the Republicans, when they do their smearing, we're telling the truth, but there is evidence that, you know, that people don't know about this about him. A lot of low information that's against their interests, there is, you know, the potential for the campaign to be kind of more positive they want to be. Well, one reason we got more involved in an addition of feeling like it works is that