[Updated May 14] Ben Sasse, a university president and former Bush administration official, won the May 13 GOP Senate primary with 49 percent of the vote. Banker Sid Dinsdale came in second with 22 percent, and former state Treasurer Shane Osborn got 21 percent. Mr. Sasse is expected to win the general election easily in November.
Here’s the background: The primary for retiring Republican Sen. Mike Johanns’s seat had been a nasty affair, with the top two candidates – and outside groups spending on their behalf – duking it out on the airwaves. That created an opening for a third candidate, Mr. Dinsdale, to rise in the polls.
The favorite of the national tea party establishment was Mr. Sasse, president of Midland University in Fremont, Neb. He was endorsed by Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Mike Lee of Utah, as well as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Washington-based conservative groups FreedomWorks, Club for Growth, and the Senate Conservatives Fund also supported him. In late March, FreedomWorks took the unprecedented step of switching its endorsement from Shane Osborn, a former state treasurer, to Sasse. FreedomWorks head Matt Kibbe said that Mr. Osborn had “formed allegiances with Mitch McConnell and the K Street lobbying class” that signaled a “progression away from the grass roots.”
Osborn is a decorated former Navy pilot who was detained in China for 12 days in 2001. Despite Sasse’s national tea party support, back in Nebraska many local tea party activists were with Osborn. In an April 8 letter, 52 Nebraska tea partyers objected to the involvement of outside groups in their Senate primary.
“We are disappointed with the way DC organizations are telling Nebraskans what the Tea Party in Nebraska thinks,” the letter said.
