Nebraska Democrats are boosting a Senate candidate. Her pitch: Help someone else win

By Ethan Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — “Good” or “someone we can trust” are words you’d expect to find candidates using to describe themselves.

But on the website of Cindy Burbank, a Democrat running for Senate in Nebraska, they don’t describe her. They refer to another candidate running to defeat Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts: independent Dan Osborn.

Tuesday’s Nebraska Democratic Senate race is one of the year’s strangest primary elections, as Burbank is running a campaign largely to block her opponent, William Forbes, from becoming the party’s nominee.

Democrats argue Forbes, a President Donald Trump-supporting, abortion-opposing pastor from rural Nebraska, is a plant who aims to win the Democratic line to siphon votes away from Osborn, a Navy veteran and union leader. They want Burbank to win on Tuesday so she can then drop out and allow the party to boost Osborn.

“William Forbes is not running to serve Nebraskans. He is running to trick voters,” Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb said in March. “The Nebraska Democratic Party made a deliberate, principled decision not to field a candidate in the US Senate race.”

Forbes told CNN he’s a lifelong Democrat and said the party needed to return to the “morality” it represented under President John F. Kennedy.

Nebraska Democrats are pinning their hopes on Osborn, who came within 7 percentage points of defeating the state’s other Republican senator in 2024, even as Trump won Nebraska by more than 20 and Ricketts, who is heavily favored against a small field of primary challengers Tuesday, won by an even larger margin.

However, despite the party’s plans, Forbes and Burbank both jumped into the primary on the last day of filing.

Following a complaint from the state Republican Party in which it called Burbank a “plant,” Nebraska’s GOP secretary of state attempted to block Burbank from the ballot as not a “good faith candidate,” a move the state Supreme Court reversed.

Burbank told The New York Times that she planned to drop out assuming Osborn collects enough signatures to make the ballot as an independent.

“I will stay in until it is obvious that I cannot win in November, and I will drop out,” she said.

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CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski contributed to this report.

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