LINCOLN, Nebraska — Decision Desk HQ projected in the early hours of Wednesday, November 4, 2026, that Republican Senator Pete Ricketts has held off independent challenger Dan Osborn to win his first full term in Nebraska's U.S. Senate race — surviving, if the projection holds, the strongest independent Senate campaign in America this year. The Associated Press has not called the race: in the AP count, Ricketts led Osborn 329,073 votes to 291,485, a margin of 37,588 votes, with 1,056 of Nebraska's 1,322 precincts reporting (79.88 per cent) and an estimated 79.9 per cent of the vote counted.
Source: Associated Press election results, U.S. Senate Nebraska (Race 28594)
Decision Desk HQ made its call at 1:34 a.m. Eastern time, with about 83 per cent of the expected vote in, becoming the first major decision desk to project the race. The shape of the night explains why the AP is being more cautious: Osborn, whose support was concentrated in the early and mail ballots counted first, led by about 21 percentage points — roughly 30,000 votes — in the earliest returns released by the Nebraska Secretary of State, before Ricketts steadily overtook him as Election Day ballots were counted, moving ahead late in the evening and building the lead the AP count now shows.
Source: The Daily Nebraskan, Nebraska midterm live updates
The union leader who made a Trump +20 state a real race — twice
Osborn is a former president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union's Local 50G in Omaha and a former industrial mechanic who ran for the Senate as an independent in 2024 and came within single digits of defeating Republican Senator Deb Fischer — a result that made him a national figure and persuaded Nebraska Democrats to clear his path this time: the party's own nominee, Cindy Burbank, won the Democratic primary with 89.2 per cent of the vote and then withdrew to support him, and the state party voted on August 24 not to fill the vacancy, leaving no Democrat on the November ballot. Minor candidates Robin Richards, Mike Marvin and Chuck Conboy also appeared on the ballot and took small shares.
Source: 2026 United States Senate election in Nebraska — candidates and primaries
Ricketts, a former two-term governor of Nebraska and a member of the billionaire Ricketts family that owns the Chicago Cubs, was appointed to the Senate in 2023 and won a special election in 2024 for a shortened term; he took 81.8 per cent of the vote in the May 12, 2026 Republican primary against minimal opposition. This race was for his first full six-year term — and it was never supposed to be close in a state Donald Trump carried by about 20 points. The final New York Times/Siena University poll, conducted October 23–29 among 809 likely voters, had Ricketts ahead 49 to 43 with a margin of error of 4.2 points — close enough that both campaigns spent election night braced for exactly the long, lead-changing count that followed.
Source: 2026 United States Senate election in Nebraska — candidates and primaries
How the night turned
Nebraska counts its early and mail ballots first, and those ballots were Osborn's strength: the first returns after polls closed at 8 p.m. Central showed him ahead by about 30,000 votes, and his watch party in Omaha celebrated an early 21-point lead, the Daily Nebraskan reported from the scene. Everyone in both camps expected the lead to shrink as the Election Day vote — cast in person, and more Republican — was added, and it did, county by county, until Ricketts moved in front at around 11:15 p.m. Central and then kept extending the margin through the night. By the time Decision Desk HQ called it, the remaining vote no longer offered Osborn a realistic path back.
Source: The Daily Nebraskan, Nebraska midterm live updates
Decision Desk HQ's projection is a statistical judgement by one decision desk, not an official result. The Associated Press had not called the race in its latest count, and Nebraska's result becomes official only after the state canvass and certification. Awaaz Punjab will update this story if the AP call or the certified count differs.
Why it matters beyond Nebraska
Nebraska sits on Interstate 80, one of the most important east–west trucking corridors in the United States, and its Senate vote counts on the same national questions this desk covers daily — highway funding, freight regulation, immigration and labour. Osborn's campaign, built on a union mechanic's biography and an anti-billionaire message aimed at working-class voters of both parties, was watched nationally as a test of whether an independent labour candidate could win in a deeply Republican state; his second straight single-digit-style performance, even in a projected defeat, keeps that question alive for 2028 and beyond. For Ricketts, holding the seat preserves the Republicans' Senate numbers on a night when Democrats won the chamber — limiting how far the new majority's margins stretch.
What happens next
Counting continues on the remaining roughly one-fifth of Nebraska's vote, including late-reported precincts and mail ballots, and the AP will make its own call when the outstanding vote can no longer change the outcome. The result is then confirmed through the state canvass before certification. If the projection holds, Ricketts begins a full six-year term in January, and Nebraska Republicans keep both of the state's Senate seats — but they do so having been pushed, for the second election in a row, by an independent union candidate with no party machine behind him.
Source: Associated Press election results, U.S. Senate Nebraska (Race 28594)