Dem
47
GOP
53
Yesterday, the good people of Omaha, NE, headed to the polls to elect a mayor. And although Omaha mayoral races are nominally nonpartisan, this one was just like every other "nonpartisan" race these days. That is to say, everyone knows that three-term incumbent Jean Stothert is a Republican, and that challenger John Ewing Jr. is a Democrat. And once the ballots were counted, Ewing won a crushing victory, taking 56% of the vote to 44% for Stothert. That makes the mayor-elect the first Black person to serve as the city's chief executive.
Naturally, given the small number of elections of any significance right now, people are glomming onto this result as a referendum on Donald Trump. Let us begin by pointing out the main reasons you will want to be cautious about that conclusion. Omaha is pretty cosmopolitan and pretty purple, and of the last six people to serve as mayor, three were Republicans and three were Democrats. The congressional district in which Omaha is located, NE-02, is D+3, and while it's gone Republican in every House election save one since 1995, its electoral vote has gone for the Democrat in three of the last five elections. Also, if you look at the "issues" page of Ewing's website, it actually looks pretty Republican, unless you keep reading for a while. The issues highlighted at the top of the page are things like crime prevention, fiscal responsibility and homeland security. It isn't until you get into the 27th and 28th items on the page that Ewing talks about women's rights and support for immigrants.
Now, let's note a couple of reasons that "this election was a referendum on Trump" is not completely out of the question. First, although the race retained a local focus until the last few weeks, Stothert eventually saw she was in trouble, and started attacking Ewing as someone who really wants trans girls to be able to play girls' sports. Undoubtedly, there are two, maybe even three trans girls trying to do so in Nebraska, so it's clearly a very relevant issue. Ewing returned fire with claims that Stothert is just a Trump stooge who wants to implement the worst parts of his agenda. Point is, the election wasn't terribly Trumpy... until it was.
Second, Ewing didn't just win; as we note, it was a laugher. Elections in Omaha and/or NE-02 are rarely decided by double-digits. Further, if the Democrats are going to retake the House, this is precisely the kind of district they need to flip (in fact, the current NE-02 representative, Republican Don Bacon, is a top target of the DCCC). What the blue team needs is to swing 2-3% of the vote in 15-20 of these purple districts, and the House will almost certainly be theirs. And Ewing just swung considerably more than 2-3% of the vote. So, Democrats should indeed feel good about this result. Just not TOO good. (Z)