OMAHA, Neb. (AP) – Then Ben Sasse heard GOP activists in Nebraska were ready to condemn him for insufficiently backing Donald Trump, the Republican senator didn’t try to talk them out. Instead, he hit first
In a five minute video posted on Facebook and YouTubeSasse ripped off fellow Republicans for following a ‘personality cult’ and ‘acting like politics is religion’.
It’s the no-excuses approach that Nebraskans have come to expect – and even appreciate – from their junior senator, who cultivates anti-Trumpism as his brand, perhaps more than any other up-and-coming Republican leader.
Sasse has said Trump’s allegations of electoral fraud were “lies” and that Trump “rallied a mob attacking the Capitol” on Jan. 6, when Congress voted to confirm Joe Biden’s election victory. Sasse is one of the small group of Republicans who are believed to be most likely to vote to condemn Trump on charges of inciting an uprising during the Senate impeachment process concludes.
Sasse’s criticism of Trump arouses many activists in deeply Republican Nebraska. But Sasse is also gaining some respect for expressing his opinion, even if it isn’t popular, a trait that some Republicans say reminded them of the former president himself.
“I’d rather he say what he sees and thinks,” said Tracy Fackler, an auto repair shop owner in Omaha, who, like many in the state, said he voted for Trump for much the same reason.
Sasse, who was elected to a second six-year term last year, doesn’t have to worry much about the fallout from his anti-Trump campaign in a state that Trump won by 18 percentage points in November. Sasse’s more immediate risk is how his votes on impeachment will continue with Republicans if he ran for president in 2024.
Of the small number of Republican senators who have sided with the Democrats in impeachment, only 48-year-old Sasse is considered someone still striving for higher office. In fact, he is betting that there is a political future in his efforts to fight for the incumbent Republican party’s comeback.
“We still agree on some big things,” he said in his video, pointing to values his party often promoted before Trump. “Rule of law. Constitutionalism. Limited government. “
Even in Nebraska, Sasse has reason to think there is a market for what he is selling.
He won nearly 27,000 more votes than Trump in the state, proving better to hold on to wayward GOP voters and win over Democrats. Twenty-one percent of Nebraska Democrats supported Sasse, while only 4% supported Trump, according to AP VoteCast, a poll of the electorate. Meanwhile, 7% of Republicans voted for Biden, while 3% of Republicans voted for Sasse’s challenger, Democrat Chris Janicek.
Sasse took advantage of a scandal that befell Janicek. But the incumbent also showed strength in mood-swept neighborhoods in the Omaha suburbs, places similar to those suburbs of the presidential battlefield state where Trump lost ground last year.
“I think he’s just a man who stands up for common principles and values and doesn’t agree with Trump,” said Mike Lewis, a 56-year-old broker from South Omaha and a registered Democrat for 30 years who calls himself a moderate. . “I believe he is a man of morals and principles, not party lines.”
It’s a diverse, older, high-class suburb of neighborhoods and small businesses – just like the working and middle class voters just outside Milwaukee, or St. Paul, Minn. Omaha’s once thriving cattle ranches are only a mile to the east, and steam rises over the head of Nebraska Beef and other smaller meat packers.
Fackler scraped ice from his sidewalk a few blocks away and praised Sasse for “his story.”
What he said was unpopular because of the way he said it. Everyone else was just walking around, and he just told it like it was, ”said Fackler, adding that he was a rare voter until Sasse ran in 2014 and Trump ran two years later. “When you record the party, you get a lot of criticism.”
A stone’s throw away, Leah Fontenelle braved the single digits on her front stoop next to Fackler.
“I’d rather someone speak up than just bow to the party,” said the 65-year-old retired director of medical facilities who voted for Trump. “The party does not appeal to everyone.”
But the elected officials must represent the party’s views, Kolene Woodward said.
More than 450 miles to the west, the Scotts Bluff County GOP chairman had become enraged at Sasse in mid-January after the senator said Trump had “ consistently lied by claiming he had ‘won the election by a landslide’ and that the then president had “fallen into his duty to defend the constitution and uphold the rule of law” during the siege of the Capitol.
He has made such a public spectacle of his hatred of President Trump. And Nebraska doesn’t feel like that, ”Woodward said. She described Sasse as “Oh, just so disrespectful to the former president.”
Three other provincial GOP committees have voted to disapprove of Sasse. The state’s republican central committee is expected to consider at least eight separate resolutions to disapprove him when it meets next month.
Several other Republicans have dealt with similar name calling at home, including representatives Liz Cheney from Wyoming, Fred Upton from Michigan, and Tom Rice from South Carolina.
Sasse’s criticism of Trump isn’t the only complaint Republicans have against the senator. Some Republicans grumble about his professor style. Sasse holds degrees from Harvard and Yale, and was later president of Midland University, a Christian school in eastern Nebraska.) Critics also say that in his six years in office, Sasse has not led to a large piece of legislation or been a regular participant in fundraising by parties.
During his 2014 campaign, Sasse repeatedly said that he identified himself more as a Conservative than a Republican.
The sentiment came through in the video that Sasse released on February 4. He threw angry GOP committee members out of line with not only some on the committee itself, but other Nebraska Republicans and, more broadly, Nebraska voters.
Purging “Trump skeptics” would be “terrible for our party,” he said, calling for a refocus on shared conservative principles.
It’s a tack that could convince Lewis, the self-proclaimed moderate Democrat, to back Sasse on the national stage.
“I don’t always agree with him,” said Lewis. “But I agree with his principles and his willingness to speak his mind.”