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    In Nebraska, a Trump-Inspired Candidate Cracks Open Divide in the G.O.P.

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    Charles W. Herbster’s bid for governor has set off a bitter fight for power in a state once known for its genteel politics.WAHOO, Neb. — In his run for governor of Nebraska, Charles W. Herbster is doing his best imitation of former President Donald J. Trump.His 90-minute stump speech is packed with complaints about illegal immigrants, stories boasting of his business triumphs, a conspiracy theory connecting China, the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 election, and denials of the recent accusations that he’s groped women at political events.He even vows to clean up the “swamp” — but he means Lincoln, the state capital.Like his political role model — and chief backer — Mr. Herbster is proving to be a one-man political wrecking ball. In a state long known for genteel, collaborative politics and, for the last 24 years, one-party rule, Mr. Herbster’s bid has cracked his party into three camps, with Trump supporters, establishment conservatives and business-friendly moderates battling for power. A major donor for years to conservative candidates, Mr. Herbster has been abandoned by longtime political allies and seen his running mate quit his ticket to run for governor herself. The allegations of groping are coming from fellow Republicans.Behind all the drama is a question with resonance far beyond Nebraska. Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Herbster, a major donor to Mr. Trump’s political career, isn’t just the first-time candidate’s top credential — it is his campaign’s entire rationale. Mr. Trump’s name is on Mr. Herbster’s lawn signs, ads and billboards. Mr. Herbster spent Friday stumping across western Nebraska with Steven Moore, the former Trump economic adviser who is a minor Trumpworld celebrity.Mr. Herbster is about to find out if a Trump endorsement alone is enough to win a major Republican primary.“This is a proxy war between the entire Republican establishment in America against President Donald J. Trump,” Mr. Herbster, who campaigns wearing a white cowboy hat and a black vest bearing the logo of his cattle semen business, said in an interview Thursday. “Anybody who the establishment cannot control, they are fearful of.”Mr. Herbster, a longtime Trump ally who was with members of the Trump family during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, is running against Jim Pillen, a University of Nebraska regent who is backed by the state’s powerful Ricketts family political machine, and Brett Lindstrom, a youthful state senator who has consolidated support from the party’s remaining moderates and Democrats. More than 8,000 Democrats have switched parties in recent weeks to have some influence on a governor’s contest in an overwhelmingly Republican state. Polling in the final days before Tuesday’s vote shows the race is a three-way dead heat.One of Mr. Herbster’s rivals, Jim Pillen, is backed by Nebraska’s powerful Ricketts family political machine.Walker Pickering for The New York TimesIf Ohio’s recent Senate primary is a guide, the three-way race is working in Mr. Herbster’s favor. The Trump-endorsed candidate for Senate, J.D. Vance, won in a crowded field, taking less than one-third of the vote. (There’s precedent for this in Nebraska. Eight years ago, Gov. Pete Ricketts won the nomination with just over a quarter of the vote.)But Mr. Trump’s touch is looking less golden in other states, particularly in two-way contests for governor. In Georgia, former Senator David Perdue, Mr. Trump’s choice, is lagging far behind Gov. Brian Kemp in polling, leading Mr. Trump to distance himself from that campaign. In Idaho, the former president has backed Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin’s challenge against Gov. Brad Little. Ms. McGeachin has struggled to gain traction, and Mr. Trump hasn’t mentioned her since his endorsement in November.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.A Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving like the head of a 19th-century political machine.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.Mr. Trump has thrown his full weight behind Mr. Herbster. On Sunday, he traveled to Nebraska for a rally and appeared on a conference call for Herbster supporters Thursday night, where he cast Mr. Herbster’s rivals as “Republicans in name only.”“Charles was a die-hard MAGA champion,” Mr. Trump said on the call. “When you vote for Charles in the primary, you can give a stinging rebuke to the RINOs and sellouts and the losers who are so poorly representing your state.”Like Mr. Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Mr. Herbster is facing accusations that he has mistreated women and tried to use that fact to gain support. . Two women, including a state senator, publicly accused him of groping them at a political event in 2019. Mr. Herbster has denied the claims and broadcast a TV ad slamming his accuser.“Any allegation that was sent my way is 100 percent totally false,” he said in an interview.He has repeatedly blamed the accusations on Mr. Ricketts, a conservative two-term incumbent who cannot run again because of term limits. The Ricketts family has feuded with Mr. Trump. It spent millions on a last-ditch effort to block Mr. Trump from winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2016; Trump then said the family better “be careful.”Mr. Ricketts, who tried talking Mr. Trump out of endorsing Mr. Herbster last year, is blunt about his opposition to Mr. Herbster’s bid. He considers the groping allegations disqualifying. Should Mr. Herbster win the Republican nomination, Mr. Ricketts will not endorse him unless he “apologizes to the women he’s done this to,” he said in an interview.Mr. Trump has thrown his full weight behind Mr. Herbster, traveling to Nebraska for a rally on Sunday. He has called the candidate’s rivals “Republicans in name only.”Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesMr. Herbster was facing criticism well before the allegations. Some Republicans bristled at his focus on the sort of divisive cultural issues that don’t typically dominate the political conservation in the state. He campaigns on eliminating sex education in Nebraska’s public schools, cracking down on illegal immigration and curbing China’s influence.In July, his running mate, the former state senator Theresa Thibodeau, quit the ticket and later jumped into the race herself. She said Mr. Herbster had little interest in anything other than trying to emulate Mr. Trump.“If you want to lead the state, you should get your knowledge up on policies that affect our state,” she said on Thursday. “He had no initiative or willingness to do that.”But Mr. Herbster’s message resonated with Trump conservatives, and soon one of his rivals followed suit. Mr. Pillen, a 66-year-old former defensive back for the University of Nebraska’s football team with a grandfatherly demeanor, promised to ban critical race theory at the University of Nebraska and bar transgender women from participating in women’s sports or using women’s bathrooms.“Both the Pillen and the Herbster campaigns have focused on national issues of which they have little control over and they should have been more focused on state issues,” said former Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican who was on Mr. Herbster’s payroll after leaving office. He hasn’t yet made an endorsement.Mr. Pillen downplayed Mr. Trump’s influence in the race.“Nebraskans, we like to figure things out and solve our own problems and think for ourselves,” he said.Mr. Lindstrom, a 41-year-old state senator who also played football for Nebraska, is running a campaign transported from the pre-Trump era. He highlights cooperation with Democrats in Nebraska’s unicameral legislature and, while he said he had no regrets about voting twice for Mr. Trump, said he’d prefer “a new face” in 2024.“The style and brand that’s going on in the Republican Party right now has created a lot of wedges,” Brett Lindstrom said of the Trump era.Walker Pickering for The New York TimesWhile Nebraska’s Republican primaries are typically decided by conservative rural voters who are deeply loyal to Mr. Trump, Mr. Lindstrom, a wonky financial adviser, is betting his campaign on appealing to urban professionals around Omaha — where Mr. Trump lost one of the state’s Electoral College votes to President Biden.“The style and brand that’s going on in the Republican Party right now has created a lot of wedges,” Mr. Lindstrom said. “That isn’t really healthy.”At a Wednesday fund-raiser for Mr. Lindstrom at an upscale Italian restaurant in Omaha, about half of the two dozen people interviewed said they voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. A handful had switched parties to vote for Mr. Lindstrom in the primary.Allen Frederickson, the chief executive of a health care company who became a Republican to vote for Mr. Lindstrom, said electing Mr. Herbster would make it hard to recruit workers to Nebraska’s booming economy, which has the nation’s lowest unemployment rate.“Trumpism would impact our internal and external image as a state,” he said. “We need Nebraska to be an appealing state from a business perspective.”Mr. Herbster makes little effort to appeal outside of the Trump constituency. He begins his speeches, whether to Trump-hatted supporters in Wahoo or bankers in the Omaha suburbs, by offering “greetings from the 45th president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump.”Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Herbster casts doubt on the legitimacy of American elections. In Wahoo, he posited an outlandish theory about the former president’s loss.“This is the truth,” he told supporters. “The pandemic came from China. It was timed perfectly to make sure that they could rig the elections so Mark Zuckerberg could put $400 million into the toll the last four months of the election. Because whether you like it or not, they didn’t want Donald J. Trump to be president for two terms, that’s exactly what happened.”Mr. Herbster has little use for or interest in the traditions of Nebraska politics. He called for ending the state’s system of nonpartisan elections, eliminating the state board of education and said that, on his first day in office, he’d demand the tourism bureau change its quirky slogan: “Nebraska. Honestly, it’s not for everyone.”The question Nebraska’s Republican primary voters will settle on Tuesday is whether any of that matters — or matters more than Mr. Trump’s stamp of approval.“It’s everything,” said former Representative Lee Terry of Omaha, a Herbster supporter. “There’s a lot of Trump people in Nebraska.” More

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      The Big Question of the 2022 Midterms: How Will the Suburbs Swing?

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      Democrats and Republicans are already jockeying for a crucial voting bloc that soured on Donald Trump, tilted to Joe Biden and now holds the key to the second half of the president’s term.PAPILLION, Neb. — Pursuing a bipartisan infrastructure deal and trumpeting a revived economy and progress against the pandemic, President Biden is trying to persuade the nation that Democrats are the party that gets things done. His message is aimed at holding on to a set of voters in next year’s midterms who could determine the fate of his agenda: suburbanites who abandoned former President Donald Trump in droves.More than any other group, those independent-minded voters put Mr. Biden in the White House. Whether they remain in the Democratic coalition is the most urgent question facing the party as it tries to keep its razor-thin advantage in the House and the Senate next year. Mr. Biden made his pitch again on Friday when he signed an executive order intended to protect consumers from the anti-competitive practices of large businesses. But Republicans are also going to war for suburban votes. The party is painting the six-month-old Biden administration as a failure, one that has lost control of the Southwestern border, is presiding over soaring crime rates and rising prices and is on the wrong side of a culture clash over how schools teach the history of racism in America.Whoever wins this messaging battle will have the power to determine the outcome of the rest of Mr. Biden’s term, setting the stage for either two more years of Democrats driving their policies forward or a new period of gridlock in a divided Washington.Both parties are targeting voters like Jay Jackson, a retired career Air Force officer who is now a reservist in the Omaha suburbs. Mr. Jackson had lawn signs last year for Republicans running for Congress, but also for Mr. Biden. He thought that Mr. Trump had failed to empathize with military duty and regularly lied to Americans, and did not deserve re-election.“I’m a classic RINO,” Mr. Jackson said with a laugh, accepting the right’s favorite insult for voters like him: Republicans in Name Only. In a guest column in The Omaha World-Herald, Mr. Jackson, a 39-year-old lawyer, explained his view: “We Republicans need to turn away from Trump and back to our values and the principles of patriotism and conservatism.”Mr. Biden won 54 percent of voters from the country’s suburbs last year, a significant improvement over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and enough to overcome Mr. Trump’s expansion of his own margins in rural and urban areas, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. Suburbanites made up 55 percent of the Biden coalition, compared with 48 percent of Clinton voters.Jay Jackson encouraged fellow Republican voters to “turn away from Trump.”Walker Pickering for The New York TimesLia Post voted routinely for Republicans but supported Mr. Biden last year.Walker Pickering for The New York TimesThe authoritative Pew study, which echoed other recent surveys, also showed that Mr. Biden failed to increase his share of the Democratic base from 2016, including among young people and voters of color. It found, however, that his support surged among independents, veterans and married men — voters like Mr. Jackson.But even as Mr. Jackson crossed party lines for Mr. Biden, he supported Representative Don Bacon, a Republican who won re-election in Nebraska’s Second District, which Mr. Biden himself carried. Mr. Jackson said that he was pleased so far with the Biden administration — especially its “putting the accelerator to the floor on Covid” — but that he would very likely vote again for Mr. Bacon.It shows that in 2022, Democrats will need to count on more than the revolt of suburbia against Mr. Trump’s norm-smashing presidency to motivate their voters.The limits of the anti-Trump vote were already glimpsed last year, when half of the 14 House seats that Democrats lost, to their shock, were in suburban or exurban districts. The party also failed to defeat vulnerable Republicans in districts Mr. Biden won, such as Nebraska’s Second.For 2022, Democrats’ congressional finance committee has identified 24 “frontline” incumbents in swing districts, some two-thirds of them in suburban areas.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chair of the Democrats’ election arm, aims to fuse Republican candidates with Mr. Trump’s divisiveness and with the party’s obstruction of gun restrictions, expanding health care access and fighting climate change.“The post-Trump Republican brand is bad politics in the suburbs,” he said in an interview. “They have embraced dangerous conspiracy theories, flat-out white supremacists and a level of harshness and ugliness that is not appealing to suburban voters.”Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who leads the G.O.P. campaign arm, said Republicans would attack Democrats over a set of “incredibly toxic” issues for the suburbs. He listed them as crime, tax increases, border security and the latest flash point of the culture wars, critical race theory — the idea that racism is woven into American institutions, which Republicans have seized on in suburban school districts.Sarpy County is the fastest-growing county in Nebraska, with young newcomers drawn to jobs in tech or in Omaha’s insurance industry, and to the exploding housing market.Walker Pickering for The New York Times“It’s going to be a big issue in 2022,” Mr. Emmer said.He added that while Democrats “seem to be focused on a personality in the past” — Mr. Trump — “we’re focused on issues.”House Democrats also face structural and historical obstacles to retaining their slender nine-seat majority. In the modern era, a president’s party has lost an average of 26 House seats in midterm elections. Redistricting will place nearly all members of the chamber in redrawn seats, with Republicans wielding more power to gerrymander than Democrats.National polling shows Mr. Biden’s job approval consistently above 50 percent. But some recent surveys of swing House districts suggest that the president is less popular on specific issues. A survey in May of 37 competitive House districts by a Democratic group, Future Majority, found that more voters disliked than liked Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy, climate policy and foreign affairs. He was especially unpopular over the U.S.-Mexico border and relations with China.But Val Arkoosh, a Democratic official in the Philadelphia suburbs who is running for the Senate in 2022, said that issues that rally Democrats, like voting rights and health care, would still be on the ballot, even if Mr. Trump — who drove furious opponents to the polls last year — is not. “Yes, the former occupant of the White House is gone, but we continue to see a significant amount of obstruction in Washington around issues people here care deeply about,” she said.While suburbs across the country vary demographically and politically, the independent voters of suburban Omaha present a snapshot of the terrain where both parties will be fighting their hardest.Nebraska is one of just two states to award a share of its electoral votes by congressional district. Mr. Biden’s success in carrying the Second District, which includes Omaha and much of its suburbs, went beyond the single electoral vote he picked up. He flipped the district by 8.75 percentage points after Mr. Trump had won it in 2016 — a larger swing than in any individual battleground state.The suburban part of the district is mostly in western Sarpy County south of Omaha. It is the fastest-growing county in Nebraska, with young newcomers drawn to jobs in tech or in Omaha’s insurance industry, and to the exploding housing market.Corbin Delgado, the secretary of his party’s state Latinx Caucus, said his top issue was immigration reform.Walker Pickering for The New York TimesJen Day won a State Senate race as a Democrat, though many of her voters supported a Republican candidate for Congress.Walker Pickering for The New York TimesFields of corn race up hillsides and yield suddenly to home developments with names like the Mansions at Granite Falls. A vast Amazon distribution center that will employ 1,000 workers is under construction. A sign at another building site promises the “Future Home of Lamb of God Lutheran Church.”Older towns in the county command hilltops, their water towers visible from afar like medieval castles.Last year, Sarpy County, like most places, had higher turnout by both parties and independents compared with 2016. But the surge especially among independents probably accounts for Mr. Biden’s winning 13,000 more votes in the county than Mrs. Clinton did. (Mr. Trump’s votes increased by only about 7,000.)“We have a lot of younger families moving in,” said Charlene Ligon, an Air Force retiree who leads the county Democrats. “They may be conservative, but they’re more centrist, with younger attitudes.”Jen Day, a small-business owner in her 30s, won a State Senate race as a Democrat in November, the first time in memory the party had captured a seat in western Sarpy County.Ms. Day said many of her supporters had also voted for Mr. Bacon, the Republican congressman. “From discussions I’ve had with people in the district, I don’t think they’re pledging allegiance to either party at this point,” she said.Jeff Slobotski, a suburban father of five who changed his registration from Republican to independent, said the Bacon seat was “absolutely winnable” for Democrats in 2022. A Trump supporter in 2016, Mr. Slobotski voted for Mr. Biden last year.Mr. Slobotski, 43, is an executive for a company that brings tech start-ups and arts groups to an emerging neighborhood in the city. He spoke over lunch last week at a downtown Omaha restaurant, the Kitchen Table. The restaurant windows displayed posters for Black Lives Matter and for a young state senator, Tony Vargas, who has been mentioned as a possible Democratic nominee to take on Mr. Bacon.Fields of corn race up hillsides and yield suddenly to home developments.Walker Pickering for The New York TimesAlthough Mr. Slobotski voted for Mr. Bacon, he said he would support Mr. Vargas if he ran for the seat. “He’s just a young visionary, somebody with leadership ability, more of a pragmatist,” he said of Mr. Vargas, a former Omaha school board member. The Democrats’ 2020 nominee, Kara Eastman, was considered by many to be too progressive for the District.Later that day, at a restaurant in Papillion, a group of three other 2020 ticket-splitting voters sipped iced coffees as they assessed Washington under unified Democratic control.All three had voted for Mr. Biden, but none supported the drive by many congressional Democrats to blow up the filibuster to pass Mr. Biden’s most ambitious agenda items.These voters preferred a scaled-back infrastructure package that, even if it left major spending on education and climate on the table, could pass with bipartisan support and represent a show of unity. “It’s one of those things that kind of builds relationships to get things going,” said Michael Stark, 30, an independent.The filibuster is “there for a purpose and I am terrified of what would happen if it went away,” said Corbin Delgado, 26, a Democrat who works for a nonprofit group and is the secretary of his party’s state Latinx Caucus. He said his top issue was immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented. He voted for Mr. Bacon last year, he said, because the Republican had modified his opposition to some immigration changes after meeting with activists. “I’m a big believer that when a politician actually listens and changes, that should be rewarded,” he said.But he would leap at the chance to vote in 2022 for Mr. Vargas, who represents a district with a large Hispanic population.Lia Post, 54, grew up in a conservative religious family and voted routinely for Republicans. An activist for legalizing medical marijuana, she supported Mr. Biden last year. She said that more than anything else, she was relieved by the absence of perpetual chaos in Washington.“I don’t feel so stressed out all the time,” she said. “I just feel now I have a president that I can just breathe,” she added, and not worry, “‘Oh, God, what’s the next thing?’” More