Nebraska Politics Are Famously Moderate. Abortion Is Changing That.

OMAHA, Nebraska — For decades, Nebraska’s Democratic Party not only accepted, but elevated members who opposed abortion rights. There was former Sen. Bob Kerrey, who considered “the unborn to be human life and entitled to all the protections the state can legally offer” when he first ran for governor, before shifting to the left on the issue. There was former Sen. Ben Nelson, the state’s most recent Democratic governor, who opposed abortion rights throughout his career. And then there was Heath Mello, the former state senator backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders in his Omaha mayoral campaign in 2017, despite sponsoring legislation to restrict abortion rights while in the legislature.

One of was those Democrats was also Mike McDonnell, a former Omaha fire chief, union leader and life-long Roman Catholic who cited his religious beliefs in his opposition to the procedure.

But earlier this month, the party’s tolerance for McDonnell and Democrats like him changed when Nebraska’s Democratic Party brought McDonnell up for a censure vote. McDonnell’s support for legislation to curtail abortion access in the state and to restrict gender-affirming care for children and teenagers was unacceptable to other Democrats.

The bill was a “crime against humanity,” Ann Ashford, a former Democratic congressional candidate and wife of the late Rep. Brad Ashford, told me as we discussed the case here recently. But at the same time, she didn’t feel right about what the Democratic Party was doing to McDonnell in return.

“We just have put in place these litmus tests,” she said. “We’re doing everything we can to eat our young.”

The coffee shop where Ashford and I met had progressive Democrat written all over it, with fliers on the wall that said, “Free Palestine,” and “No Thanks for Products Supporting Genocide.” But Ashford knew this kind of messaging is an anomaly in her state. And she worried that, politically, it might be counterproductive for a party with hopes of growing its ranks in a heavily conservative state.

Ever since the fall of Roe v. Wade, Republicans have been the party without an answer on abortion. It was rocket fuel for Democrats in the midterms and in special elections, even in red states like Kansas and Ohio. The Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe repulsed women in the suburbs and damaged Republicans up and down the ballot. Former President Donald Trump, who is all but certain to win the Republican presidential nomination, is cautious even talking about it.

Democrats don’t have that problem. But they do have a different one, which is what Ashford was getting at. Roughly 15 percent of Democrats nationally consider themselves “pro-life” or say abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. That isn’t nothing in elections that are often decided at the margins. And as the left becomes more intense — out of political necessity — in its reaction to serious threats to abortion rights in red states, it is also becoming more tribal.

Even here, in “Nebraska Nice” Nebraska, progressive instincts to attach a purity test to one of the party’s most closely held values is also testing the party’s ability to keep those Democrats in the fold.

Democrats here knew where McDonnell stood on the issue, after all, and they still supported him.

Until they didn’t. Earlier this year, in a precursor to the state party’s censure vote, the local Democratic Party in Omaha’s Douglas County passed a measure to formally withhold support from McDonnell. It was largely symbolic, but Ashford told me she texted the county party chair before the vote.

“I just said, ‘Please, we are supposed to be the party of the big tent,’” she told me. “If you go back, Democrats were full of Irish Catholics who all were anti-choice, and that’s just the way they came.”

She said, “I was really disappointed with Mike’s votes the last session.” But she said, “I understand he did what his conscience told him he had to do.”

At the county level and again at the state party meeting, in Lincoln, Democrats were less forgiving. When the censure resolution went to a voice vote, it wasn’t even close.

Standing at the microphone on a small stage, Jane Kleeb, the state party chair, told delegates what the party had done was “obviously a very difficult thing, not because the party doesn’t condemn the actions and the words of Senator McDonnell, but because many in the party know that sometimes our actions are then taken out of context and used against us, used against those in the community, used against other candidates.”

The party, she said, was not questioning McDonnell’s party affiliation. But the party’s base had “changed,” she said, and candidates and elected officials should reflect that.

Kleeb knows something about organizing and coalition building. Before she became chair of the state party in 2016, she gained prominence in progressive circles as an anti-Keystone XL pipeline activist — on that issue, which also exposed rifts in the party, Rolling Stone called her the “Keystone Killer.” The McDonnell controversy wasn’t really about intraparty division. It was about “how far the party has come even within four years” on the issue of abortion, since McDonnell was reelected in 2020.

“We need our elected Democrats to protect women’s reproductive rights, period,” she said. “There’s no more squishy middle in that, and I think that has changed in the last four years … When he got elected four years ago, we did not have the Supreme Court decision.”

Since the overturning of Roe, she said, abortion had transformed in the Democratic Party’s psyche like civil rights or gay marriage had, when once “you had Democrats who weren’t great on civil rights,” or when “it was OK at some point to just say you’re OK with civil unions.”

“But then,” she said, “there was a point where that wasn’t OK.”

It’s hard enough being a Democrat in Nebraska. The state is so reliably Republican no Democratic presidential candidate has carried the state since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points in 2020.

That said, Nebraska has also, until recently, maintained a reputation for moderation. Its legislature is nonpartisan and unicameral. In the second congressional district, voters in 2020 went both for Don Bacon, a Republican, for Congress, and Joe Biden, a Democrat, for president. On the days I visited, rainbow flags and “Black Lives Matter” banners shared space in neighborhoods with statues of Mary and signs that read, “Pre-born Rights are Human Rights.”

Ashford was joined at the coffee shop by her best friend, Mary Barrett, a longtime Democratic fundraiser who left the party in 2020 and now helps raise money for Bacon. And at the Friday night fish fry I attended — one of numerous, odorous, fish fries held at Catholic churches around town during Lent — both the county’s Republican sheriff, Aaron Hanson, and the Democrat running to unseat Bacon, state Sen. Tony Vargas, were there to volunteer collecting trash.

“There’s a lot of good, common-sense Democrats and Republicans,” Hanson told me, even if he said he heard “more of the hyper-partisan rhetoric” in recent years — “a lot of people are yelling at each other.”

But whatever middle-of-the-road sensibilities Nebraska might have, they took a hit after the overturning of Roe and its very real fallout here. When the legislature passed the abortion ban and restrictions on gender-affirming care last year, the Associated Press reported that “protesters in a chamber balcony stood and yelled obscenities at conservative lawmakers while throwing what appeared to be bloody tampons onto the floor.” In the Capitol rotunda, they shouted “Shame!” And Republicans weren’t exactly looking to bridge any partisan divides, either. When the state’s Republican governor, Jim Pillen, signed the measure into law, he called it “the most significant win for social conservatives in our state in a generation.”

In that light, the censure of McDonnell is one more sign not just of the eroding center in American politics, but of how the abortion issue is changing Democrats, who, in the absence of Roe, are becoming less tolerant of heterodoxy, even if it hurts one of their own.

McDonnell’s offense, in Democrats’ minds, was not just that he had voted for the bill; it was that he’d cleared the way procedurally for it to happen. Joining Republicans in the legislature, he gave the GOP the vote they needed to end a filibuster and advance legislation that would have banned abortion once cardiac activity could be detected. It was a Republican lawmaker who later held that legislation up, fearful the bill would ban the procedure before many women even know they are pregnant. The legislature ultimately passed a 12-week ban, along with restrictions on gender-affirming care.

Democrats had expected that from Republicans, but they wanted more from McDonnell.

“He’s a turncoat,” Kirk Trammel, a custodial worker at an Omaha high school, told me at a pancake breakfast where Vargas went the morning after the fish fry. His colleague, Ronnie Hill, said, “I have strong religious views,” but, “I don’t believe that my religious beliefs should be enforced on you.”

Ken Riter, a progressive activist in Omaha, said he was worried about reports that McDonnell is mulling a run for mayor of Omaha. “I think Democrats should send a message that if you’re not going to support our key constituencies — women and gay people and especially trans people right now — why should we support you?” he said.

“Before the fall of Roe, this was all hypothetical,” said Crystal Rhoades, the former Douglas County Democratic Party chair who is now the elected clerk of the county’s District Court. “And so having a pro-life Democrat in the legislature was frankly, until about 2016, quite common here in Omaha.”

But that may be changing. While public support for abortion rights is lower in Nebraska than among Americans overall, surveys suggest at least a plurality — and possibly a majority — of Nebraskans believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases.

Democrats, she said, “don’t have to hide from this anymore.”

Still, even if public sentiment on abortion has shifted in Democrats’ favor, Rhoades thought the censure of McDonnell was a mistake.

While “I hate that he votes that way” on abortion rights, she said, “I agree with him more than I don’t” on other issues and would rather focus on unseating Republicans — “people that I never agree with.”

And censuring McDonnell, who is now president of the Omaha Federation of Labor, could do a disservice to those efforts, she said, risking offending his supporters, including donor-heavy organized labor.

“It’s terrible for the party, because if they withdraw their support, the people who are in those rooms, that’s the money that comes in reliably that they don't have to work very hard for,” she said. “This is not helping us.”

When I spoke with Vargas, who lost to Bacon in 2022 and is challenging him again this year in a competitive, nationally watched House race, he told me that he agreed that the party was evolving on abortion, that “we do have, I would say, more bright lines.”

“I do believe that women should be able to choose what they can and cannot do with their bodies. I do. Which is the reason why I told McDonnell, ‘Why are you doing that? You need to change your mind.’”

But Vargas said McDonnell has also “done tons” for Omaha through his work in the legislature.

“I don’t think every single Democratic elected official thinks and believes the exact same things,” he said. “And I think that’s OK.”

McDonnell did not respond to my requests for an interview. But his reasons for supporting an abortion ban are hardly a secret. After the state party censured him, McDonnell texted the Nebraska Examiner: “I am a lifelong member of the Roman Catholic Church! I am Pro-Life! The (censure) of me from the Nebraska Democratic Party will not change my Pro-Life vote!”

That’s essentially what CJ King, the chair of the Democratic Party in Douglas County, said McDonnell told him after the county party voted to withhold resources from him. “The way he put it to me was, ‘These are my values, and I’m not compromising on my values.’”

King and Maureen Monahan, a member of the Metropolitan Community College board of governors, met me for lunch at Dinker’s Bar & Grill in Omaha, and both were conflicted about the party’s treatment of McDonnell.

He has a record of advocating on important issues to Omaha families like workforce training and economic development, said Monahan, a former vice chair of the state party. If the party drew a hard line on abortion rights, she wondered, why not on other issues?

“At the next meeting, are we going to remove resources from the senators who voted for [public] money to go to private schools that can discriminate against LGBTQ people?” she asked. “I don’t want to do that. I think we have better things to do.”

Monahan told me she probably would have opposed the measure at the county level, but she was out of town. King said he voted “present,” and when I asked him how he would have voted had he taken a “yes” or “no” vote, his answer was reflective of the political repercussions many Democrats here fear.

“My job is politics, creating an infrastructure whereby Democrats can win. And I don't see how this helps it,” he said. “I love watching the Republican Party eat themselves, and I don't want to create fodder where the Republicans get to say, ‘Look at the Democrats eating themselves.’ That’s the conundrum for me.”

In fact, any comparison to the Republican turmoil in Nebraska would be unfair. In 2022, hardline conservatives and MAGA populists seized control of the state Republican Party, resulting in mass resignations by more establishment-minded party leaders in line with the state’s then-Gov. Pete Ricketts, now a U.S. senator. Earlier this year, the party endorsed primary challengers to three of the state’s five Republican members of Congress, including Republicans running against Ricketts and Bacon, the Nebraska Examiner reported. On the floor of the state legislature, one Republican state senator called the state party “broke.”

But King is not the only Democrat who worries about the McDonnell controversy drawing attention away from the GOP’s own difficulties.

When I spoke with Kleeb, the state Democratic leader, she told me, “We’re organizing, we’re raising money … I don’t want all of that success to be clouded with this one Democrat who is against us on two issues.”

Focusing on McDonnell, she said, “gives Republicans an offramp from their craziness. And I don’t like giving them an offramp, because they should own how messed up they are.”

And in Nebraska, Democrats don’t have as much of a margin as Republicans do for mistakes. Only about 27 percent of registered voters here are Democrats.

When I asked former state Sen. Burke Harr, a Democrat who represented central Omaha in the state legislature, if his party had a bigger problem in Nebraska today than it once did, he mentioned a recent Nebraska Examiner column, titled “Nebraska Democratic Party keeps finding ways to shrink,” in which longtime Nebraska political journalist C. David Kotok argued the party had “forgotten how it dominated the Governor’s Mansion for the last quarter of the 20th century and the U.S. Senate seats from 1976 until 2012.”

“We’re centrists here,” Harr told me. “The way we have traditionally won statewide offices is that Republicans fight among themselves and then you have a centrist Democrat run. Look at Bob Kerrey, look at former Sens. Jim Exon, Ben Nelson. That’s how they won statewide office.”

Of all the Democrats considering running for Omaha mayor, Harr said, McDonnell represents “one of the best chances of knocking out our three-term Republican mayor.” And Democrats, with their resolutions of no confidence, are undercutting him.

“I would say it is not good politics,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s fatal.”

Kleeb doesn’t think it is. In our conversation, she drew a distinction between censuring McDonnell and ostracizing him. Even if it sometimes takes years, she told me, politicians can change their minds. A “perfect example of that,” she said, was Biden, who signed historic legislation codifying same-sex marriage almost 20 years after voting, as a senator, against gay marriage.

With McDonnell, she said, “There’s this constant push and pull of, ‘Yes, we welcome you if you’re a pro-life Democrat, and if you’re an elected official, we expect you not to vote against women’s reproductive rights.’”

She said, “We’re asking people to hold both truths.”