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    4 Takeaways From Tuesday’s Primaries in Nebraska and West Virginia

    A federal candidate backed by former President Donald J. Trump won a contested primary for the second consecutive week on Tuesday, as Representative Alex Mooney resoundingly defeated Representative David McKinley in West Virginia in the first incumbent-vs.-incumbent primary race of 2022.But Mr. Trump’s endorsement scorecard took a hit in Nebraska, where his preferred candidate for governor, Charles W. Herbster, lost in a three-way race to Jim Pillen, a University of Nebraska regent who had the backing of the departing Gov. Pete Ricketts.Here are four takeaways from primary night in Nebraska and West Virginia:Trump successfully notched a win in West Virginia.On paper, West Virginia’s new Second Congressional District should have given an advantage to Mr. McKinley, 75, who had previously represented a larger area of its territory as he sought a seventh term. But Mr. Mooney, 50, who once led the Republican Party in neighboring Maryland, nonetheless romped across nearly the entire district, with the exception of the state’s northern panhandle, on Tuesday.Mr. Trump’s endorsement is widely seen as powering the Mooney campaign in one of the states where the former president has been most popular.Representative Alex Mooney of West Virginia at a rally last week in Greensburg, Pa., hosted by former President Donald J. Trump.Gene J. Puskar/Associated PressThroughout the race, Mr. Mooney slashed at Mr. McKinley as a “RINO” — “Republican in name only” — and took aim at some of his aisle-crossing votes, including for the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed Congress last year and the bipartisan legislation to create the commission examining the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Mr. Trump sided with Mr. Mooney early on, and invited him to appear alongside him at a rally in Pennsylvania last week. There, Mr. Trump joked that Mr. Mooney should defeat Mr. McKinley “easily.” He largely did, with landslide-level margins topping 70 percent in some of the eastern counties that border Maryland.The race comes a week after Mr. Trump helped J.D. Vance win an expensive Ohio Senate primary, and it again showed his influence when endorsing House and Senate candidates.Biden’s approach to governance suffered a defeatPresident Biden was not on the ballot in the West Virginia House race. But his belief that voters will reward members of Congress who put partisanship aside to get things done took another blow.Mr. McKinley seemingly fit very much in the long West Virginia tradition of bring-home-the-bacon lawmakers (See: Robert C. Byrd).Mr. McKinley had campaigned alongside Gov. Jim Justice, a Democrat-turned-Republican, and turned to Senator Joe Manchin III, a Democrat, in the closing stretch as a pitchman.But Republican primary voters were in no mood for compromise.“Liberal David McKinley sided with Biden’s trillion-dollar spending spree,” said one Mooney ad that began with the narrator saying he had a “breaking MAGA alert.”On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Biden delivered a speech acknowledging that he had miscalculated in his belief that Trump-style Republicanism would fade with Mr. Trump’s departure. “I never expected — let me say — let me say this carefully: I never expected the Ultra-MAGA Republicans, who seem to control the Republican Party now, to have been able to control the Republican Party,” Mr. Biden said.On Tuesday evening, voters in West Virginia reaffirmed where the power in the party lies.Trump’s pick stumbles in a governor’s raceMr. Herbster had tried to make the Nebraska governor’s primary a referendum on Mr. Trump. He called it “a proxy war between the entire Republican establishment” and the former president. He cited Mr. Trump at every opportunity. He appeared with him at a rally.But the race became about Mr. Herbster himself, after he faced accusations of groping and unwanted contact from multiple women in the final weeks of the race.Voters instead went with Mr. Pillen, a former University of Nebraska football player, who had also run as a conservative choice with the backing of the departing governor. A third candidate, Brett Lindstrom, a state senator from outside Omaha, had campaigned for support from the more moderate faction of the party.Charles W. Herbster on Tuesday night in Lincoln, Neb., after losing the Republican primary for governor.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesMr. Herbster becomes the first Trump-endorsed candidate to lose in a 2022 primary — but most likely not the last.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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    Trump-endorsed Republican accused of sexual assault loses Nebraska governor primary

    Trump-endorsed Republican accused of sexual assault loses Nebraska governor primaryCharles Herbster’s loss was a setback for Donald Trump, in his effort to bend the GOP in his direction ahead of possible 2024 run Republicans in Nebraska picked Jim Pillen as their nominee for governor on Tuesday, over a rival supported by Donald Trump and accused of groping multiple women.Charles Herbster’s loss was a setback for Trump, who has issued hundreds of endorsements and staged rallies in support of candidates including Herbster in an effort to bend the GOP in his direction ahead of a possible presidential run in 2024.Herbster’s loss raises the stakes on other high-profile primaries this month in Pennsylvania and Georgia, where Trump has also intervened.Trump’s influence proved decisive in West Virginia on Tuesday, however.In a US House primary pitting Republican incumbents against each other, Trump’s candidate, Alex Mooney, defeated David McKinley, who angered Trump by voting for Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure package and the creation of the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.In Nebraska, Pillen, a hog farm owner and veterinarian, defeated eight challengers including Herbster and Brett Lindstrom, a state senator generally viewed as a more moderate choice.“We live in the greatest place on the planet, right here in Nebraska,” Pillen said as a crowd chanted, “Let’s go, Jim!”Pillen will be a favorite in November’s general election against a state senator, Carol Blood. Nebraska has not elected a Democrat as governor since 1994.Pillen was endorsed by GOP leaders in the state including the term-limited governor, Pete Ricketts, former governor Kay Orr and former University of Nebraska football coach and congressman Tom Osborne.The allegations against Herbster didn’t stop Trump holding a rally with him.“I really think he’s going to do just a fantastic job, and if I didn’t feel that, I wouldn’t be here,” said Trump, who has denied sexual misconduct allegations of his own.Herbster alluded to the groping allegations in a concession speech.“This is one of the nastiest campaigns for governor in the history of Nebraska,” Herbster said.Last month, the Nebraska Examiner interviewed six women who claimed Herbster groped their buttocks, outside of their clothes, during political events or beauty pageants. A seventh woman said Herbster once kissed her forcibly.A Republican state senator, Julie Slama, said Herbster reached up her skirt and touched her inappropriately at a dinner in 2019.Herbster filed a defamation lawsuit against Slama, saying she was trying to derail his campaign. Slama responded with a countersuit, alleging sexual battery.Nebraska Republicans and Democrats also picked candidates for the US House seat previously held by the Republican Jeff Fortenberry, who resigned in March after he was convicted of federal corruption charges.Mike Flood, a former speaker of the Nebraska legislature, won the Republican nomination while state senator Patty Pansing Brooks was the Democratic pick. Flood will be strong favorite in the Republican-heavy first district, which includes Lincoln, small towns and a large swath of farmland.TopicsNebraskaRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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    Jim Pillen Wins Nebraska’s G.O.P. Primary for Governor Over Trump-Endorsed Rival

    Jim Pillen, a University of Nebraska regent backed by the state’s powerful Ricketts political machine, has won the Republican primary for Nebraska governor, defeating a scandal-marred millionaire who had the backing of former President Donald J. Trump.The Associated Press declared Mr. Pillen the winner over his main rivals, Charles W. Herbster, a Trump-endorsed agribusiness executive who funded his own campaign and, in the race’s final weeks, was accused of groping women, and Brett Lindstrom, a state senator who appealed to the moderate wing of the party.Mr. Pillen’s victory makes him an overwhelming favorite to become Nebraska’s next governor in November. Democrats have not won a statewide election since 2006. The party nominated Carol Blood, a state senator from the Omaha suburbs.Mr. Herbster is the first candidate endorsed by Mr. Trump to lose a Republican primary in 2022. Many more Trump-endorsed candidates are facing stiff headwinds in coming primaries, starting with contests for governor in Idaho next week and in Georgia on May 24.Mr. Pillen, in his victory remarks in Lincoln, pledged to run an administration focused on education and agriculture, two pillars of the state. He said he would promote Nebraska to both attract new residents and keep young people from leaving for other states.“We all agree, we’re all in unison, we never ever, ever, give up on kids,” he said. “We’re going to invest the farm in our kids, so all of our kids know, the grass is greenest in Nebraska.”Mr. Pillen, 66, ran a campaign predicated on the idea that Nebraska Republicans were satisfied with the administration of Gov. Pete Ricketts, his main political benefactor and most prominent supporter, who is stepping down because of term limits. Mr. Ricketts spent millions on television advertising backing Mr. Pillen while attacking Mr. Herbster and Mr. Lindstrom.Once Mr. Herbster began to gain traction in the race, the mild-mannered Mr. Pillen adopted some of his rival’s right-wing positions on social issues. He sought to bar the teaching of critical race theory in the University of Nebraska system and came out against allowing transgender athletes from competing in high school girls’ sports in the state.Mr. Pillen, a former defensive back for the University of Nebraska’s football team, became a highly successful veterinarian and pig farmer in the state. In addition to Mr. Ricketts’s backing, he had endorsements from a handful of the state’s most prominent figures, including Tom Osborne, his college football coach, who was also a three-term member of Congress from western Nebraska, and the comedian Larry the Cable Guy, who was raised on a farm in the state’s southeastern corner.Much to the frustration of his opponents, Mr. Pillen skipped all of the televised debates during the primary campaign, opting instead to hold hundreds of small meetings with voters across the state. Mr. Pillen’s opponents argued that he lacked charisma and was not prepared to discuss the state’s issues; Mr. Pillen said he was building coalitions away from the prying eyes of the news media.Mr. Lindstrom sought to rebuild the type of Republican coalitions that existed before Mr. Trump’s rise. He appealed to educated professionals in the state’s urban centers of Omaha and Lincoln and put political distance between himself and Mr. Trump — saying that the 2020 election was legitimate and that he would prefer “a new face” to lead the Republican Party in 2024.While Mr. Lindstrom made a late charge in the polls, most of the race became a proxy fight between Mr. Ricketts and Mr. Trump, to whom Mr. Herbster yoked his political identity. He talked like Mr. Trump, adopted many of Mr. Trump’s policy positions and pledged to drain “the swamp” in Lincoln, the state capital.In other Nebraska races, Mike Flood, a state senator from Norfolk who owns radio and television stations across the state, won the Republican nomination to the Lincoln-based congressional seat vacated by former Representative Jeff Fortenberry, who resigned after he was convicted of lying to the F.B.I. in a campaign finance investigation.Mr. Flood defeated Mr. Fortenberry, who remained on the ballot but did not mount a campaign, and Curtis Huffman, an accountant.Democrats in Omaha nominated Tony Vargas, a state senator, to face Representative Don Bacon, a moderate Republican who is seeking his fourth term. Mr. Vargas, the son of immigrants from Peru, is a former public-school teacher in Omaha who served on the city’s school board before he was elected to the Nebraska Legislature.The House Democrats’ campaign arm is optimistic Mr. Vargas can be competitive in November, despite the difficult national environment for the party.Mr. Bacon is one of 10 House Republicans who hold a district carried by President Biden in 2020. But in the last two elections, Omaha Democrats nominated Kara Eastman, a democratic socialist who did not appeal to centrist voters in the district. Mr. Vargas has not campaigned on the left-wing issues Ms. Eastman promoted. More

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    Nebraska Governor Primary Election Results 2022

    The Republican primary is a three-way dead heat between Charles W. Herbster, a businessman backed by former President Donald J. Trump; Jim Pillen, a University of Nebraska regent supported by outgoing Gov. Pete Ricketts; and Brett Lindstrom, a state senator who appeals to the party’s moderate wing. The race has been roiled by allegations that […] More

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    How Trump Helped Transform Nebraska Into a Toxic Political Wasteland

    LINCOLN, Neb. — In the old days, Charles W. Herbster, a cattle baron and bull semen tycoon who used his fortune and influence to get into Donald Trump’s good graces, almost certainly would have been forced to pull out of Nebraska’s Republican primary for governor by now. In recent weeks, eight women, including a state senator, have come forward to allege that Mr. Herbster groped them at various Republican events or at beauty pageants at which he was a judge.But this is post-shame, post-“Access Hollywood” America, so Mr. Trump traveled to Nebraska last week for a rally at the I-80 Speedway between Lincoln and Omaha to show his continued support for Mr. Herbster. “He is innocent of these despicable charges,” Mr. Trump said. And Mr. Herbster, in true Trump fashion, has not only denied the allegations but also filed a defamation suit against one of his accusers and started running a television ad suggesting that the claims are part of a political conspiracy.Mr. Herbster sees conspiracies everywhere — conspiracies to destroy him, conspiracies to undermine Mr. Trump, conspiracies to unravel the very fabric of the nation. “This country is in a war within the borders of the country,” he told the crowd at the Starlite Event Center in Wahoo on Thursday, a few days before Tuesday’s primary election. Over more than an hour, Mr. Herbster, dressed in his trademark cowboy hat and vest, unspooled a complex and meandering tale of the threat to America, interspersed with labyrinthine personal yarns and long diatribes about taxes.It was convoluted but (as best I can understand) goes something like this: The coronavirus was manufactured in a lab in China and released into the United States in early 2020 by “illegals” from Mexico who were also smuggling Chinese-made fentanyl across the border. One of the smugglers, he said, had enough fentanyl in a single backpack to kill the entire population of Nebraska and South Dakota. The goal of this two-pronged attack, he explained, was to create a panic, stoked by Facebook and $400 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, to justify allowing voting by mail. Then, through unspecified means, the Chinese government used those mail-in ballots to steal the election — though Mr. Herbster hates that word. “They didn’t ‘steal’ it,” he told the crowd, his finger raised. “Do not use that terminology. They did not ‘steal’ it. They rigged it.”To state the obvious: This is not what political speech in Nebraska used to sound like.Mr. Herbster is challenging the allegations of eight women that he groped them.Mary Anne AndreiFor half a century, from 1959 to the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in 2009, my home state, the state near the geographical middle of the country, prided itself on being politically centrist as well. Over that span, it elected four Democrats and three Republicans to the U.S. Senate. We had six Republican governors and five Democratic. The congressional delegations were predominately Republican, but Omaha and Lincoln elected Democrats as their mayors more often than not. The Nebraska Legislature remains officially nonpartisan, and as the country’s only unicameral legislature, it forced lawmakers for many years to engage in a politics of pragmatism.Now, Nebraska is so unfailingly Republican that the party’s primaries most often determine the outcomes of statewide races. How did the state become so right wing and devoted to Mr. Trump?Part of the answer is that Nebraska’s Democrats of a generation ago were never very liberal. They were usually socially moderate, pro-business, pro-military white guys, making them all but indistinguishable from old-line, Chamber of Commerce Republicans from the coasts. Senator Edward Zorinsky aggressively advocated military aid for Nicaragua during the Carter years. Senator Bob Kerrey voted for NAFTA. Senator Ben Nelson cast his vote in favor of Obamacare only after Senator Harry Reid promised him tens of millions in federal funding for Nebraska that came to be known as the Cornhusker Kickback.But it wasn’t just the Democrats who were middle of the road. Even our Republican senators were sometimes so moderate that you could barely distinguish them from centrist Democrats. Chuck Hagel, for example, was a two-term Republican senator during Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s presidencies but later was Mr. Obama’s secretary of defense. Likewise, our Republican governors were fiscally and socially conservative, but they generally avoided the culture wars.Mr. Herbster told the crowd in Wahoo that that era is over. “This isn’t the good-old Dave Heineman days. This isn’t the good-old Charles Thone days. This isn’t the good-old Exon days,” he said, invoking the names of three centrist Nebraska governors, including J. James Exon, a Democrat who won over many Republicans by opposing tax increases and gay rights during the Carter administration.For half a century, Nebraska was politically centrist. According to Mr. Herbster, that era is over.Mary Anne AndreiIn Nebraska — as in the rest of the country — the polarization seemed to hasten about the time that Mr. Obama won the presidency. To be sure, much of the hardening against the Democratic Party specifically and ideals of tolerance and diversity more generally can be attributed to an unholy stew of angry commentary on Fox News, algorithmic political siloing on Facebook and the subsuming of Nebraska’s independent newspapers and television stations by Lee Enterprises and the Sinclair Broadcast Group.But Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, also attributes the extreme partisan vitriol to the Democratic National Committee’s decision to shift its resources away from rural red states like Nebraska, which was in part because Mr. Obama had slashed the committee’s resources.“Obama hated the D.N.C.,” Ms. Kleeb told me, “because he feels like they stabbed him in the back” by supporting Hillary Clinton over his upstart campaign in the 2008 presidential primary. Distrustful of the Democratic machine — and the party brand — Mr. Obama turned fund-raising efforts away from the D.N.C. and focused on building “progressive” organizations like Organizing for America, she said. But that created two problems.First, now cash-poor, the committee began to spend more selectively. In Nebraska, the monthly allotment went from $25,000 to $2,500. That 90 percent cut in party funding, Ms. Kleeb said, meant that Republican talking points often went unchallenged. “You’re not doing any organizing,” she said, “not because you don’t want to, not because you don’t know how to organize or create good messages, but because you don’t have the money to do it.”Second, Democrats were forced to push hard for bipartisan support on key issues, which often further muddled their messaging. Left-leaning state senators in Nebraska, for example, joined with conservative senators to ban the death penalty in 2015. (A subsequent ballot measure restored it.) In 2016 and 2017, the progressive environmentalist and pro-small-farm group Nebraska Communities United fought against the construction of a massive poultry-processing plant on the flood plain of the Lower Platte River by partnering with a local group that was afraid the plant would be staffed by Black Muslim immigrants from Somalia. Ms. Kleeb herself, when she was the director of Bold Nebraska, one of those progressive groups, helped to block the Keystone XL pipeline not by talking about its climate impact but by joining with conservative ranchers who were outraged that the power of eminent domain had been granted to a foreign corporation. The problem with that strategy over time, Ms. Kleeb acknowledges now, is that voters often walked away confused. “They don’t even know where the Democratic Party stands,” she said.Without a Democratic counterbalance, Republican primaries now determine most state races in Nebraska, so candidates are pulled further and further to the right in order to appease and appeal to an increasingly radical and angry base. In this year’s governor’s race, for example, Mr. Herbster’s top competitor, Jim Pillen, would seem to check all of the appropriate boxes for a Republican nominee in Nebraska. He’s endorsed by the current governor, Pete Ricketts. He is one of the largest hog producers in the country. He even played football for the Nebraska Cornhuskers during the glory years under Tom Osborne, who later represented Nebraska’s Third Congressional District.But as Mr. Herbster’s poll numbers have surged, Mr. Pillen has veered to the right, attacking “liberal professor groups” (though he is a member and former chair of the University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents) and running TV ads with an endorsement from the comedian Larry the Cable Guy. Last week, he posted on Twitter that he was the “only candidate to take action against CRT,” the “only candidate willing to fight the radical transgender agenda” and the “only candidate willing to call abortion what it is — murder.” (A third major candidate, Brett Lindstrom, has struck a less strident tone but holds many of the same beliefs.)Donald Trump praised Mr. Herbster at a rally in Greenwood, Neb., on May 1.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesThe crowd where Mr. Trump spoke.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesEven with that hard-line rhetoric, it will be hard for Mr. Pillen to beat Mr. Herbster’s direct endorsement from Mr. Trump. Thursday night, after the tables and chairs had been put away at the Starlite Event Center, the Herbster campaign hosted a call-in “telerally” with Mr. Trump, in which Mr. Trump praised the businessman as “a die-hard MAGA champ” and guaranteed that Mr. Herbster would “never bend to the RINOs” — Republicans in name only — like “Little Ben Sasse,” Nebraska’s junior senator, and Representative Don Bacon, whom Mr. Trump derided as “another beauty.” During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Sasse voted with him 85 percent of the time. Mr. Bacon voted with him 89 percent of the time. But Mr. Trump has considered both to be insufficiently loyal to him personally, and their political futures may be in jeopardy as a result. If so, they will be replaced by politicians who are more brazen in their contempt for the Democratic Party and for democratic ideals. That’s why the outcome of Nebraska’s Republican governor’s primary is almost immaterial.Yes, whoever emerges with the nomination will most likely become the next governor. And it would appear that Mr. Herbster retains the inside track, thanks to Mr. Trump — just as the former president has buoyed Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker to the top of their primary Senate races in Pennsylvania and Georgia and lifted J.D. Vance from a packed Republican field in the Senate primary in Ohio. But it doesn’t matter whether these candidates actually win or not, because their conspiratorial and inflammatory rhetoric has overtaken the discourse, pushing all Republican candidates further and further toward the fringe. Regardless of how the final balloting turns out in Nebraska on Tuesday, the real victor will be Donald Trump.Republican primaries now determine most state races in Nebraska.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesTed Genoways (@TedGenoways) is the author, most recently, of “This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm.” Starting this fall, he will be a president’s professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More