Fischer hangs onto lead, looks to Trump for help in Nebraska Senate battle

Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) is maintaining a lead over independent Dan Osborn in the Nebraska Senate race, a sleepy contest that has prompted former President Trump to help the incumbent Republican across the finish line. 

According to a new internal poll from the Fischer campaign, the incumbent leads by 6 percentage points — 49 to 43 percent support — over Osborn, an independent who has seen his campaign surprisingly give Fischer a run for her money. Another 7 percent of voters are undecided.

Including voters leaning one way or another, Fischer extends her lead to 7 points, with 51 percent support to 44 percent for Osborn, the poll shows.

The internal survey was conducted Oct. 12-15 among 625 likely voters in the state and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

The same poll taken a week earlier showed Fischer up by the same margin — 48 to 42 percent support — but with 10 percent of voters undecided. 

“With proper funding Senator Fischer will continue to tell her story, making it from a cattle ranch to the US Senate and fighting for Nebraska’s conservative values,” John Rogers, Fischer’s pollster, wrote in a memo. “That, coupled with educating voters about Dan Osborn’s radical leftist ideology, will continue to put this race to bed.”

The news comes as Trump cut an ad for Fischer that criticizes Osborn as a “Bernie Sanders-type Democrat.” 

“His name is Dan Osborn and he’s a radical-left person,” Trump said from his private plane in an ad for the Fischer campaign.

“We want someone that’s going to be strong, powerful and great for our country, and it’s not going to be Dan Osborn,” he added.

The spot is running in all of the non-Omaha markets across the state, and the campaign is putting $190,000 behind it. 

There has been little in the way of public polls of the race, which the Republican remains widely expected to win despite the recent scare. 

On top of the latest poll commissioned by Fischer’s team, an internal poll by Osborn’s campaign showed that he is up by 6 percentage points. 

The tightened race has prompted outside GOP money to be spent in the Cornhusker State to prop Fischer up. The Senate GOP campaign arm began spending in the state in late September in order to help ward off Osborn’s rise in the polls. 

The suddenly alive race has also attracted money behind Osborn’s operation. The union leader raked in $3.2 million during the third fundraising quarter, though he had less than $700,000 in cash on hand by the end of September. 

Fischer raised only $831,000 during the same stretch, though she had $937,000 in the bank to end the quarter. 

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) recently told Punchbowl News that “the votes are coming home” for the Nebraska Republican but conceded that the race is “a lot closer than people thought it would be.”

“We knew that once she got up on the air it would right itself. I think part of it was, she’s running against somebody who was just not defined,” he said. “The advantage of that is, you can be anything people want you to be. He was getting away with that.”

The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s aggregate of polls in the state shows Osborn ahead with 47.2 percent support to the sitting senator’s 44.6 percent.