As an Army veteran who served as an emergency room medic in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, Omaha resident Katy Eilers will have veterans’ care at the top of her priority list as she casts her vote this November for a new U.S. House representative for Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District.

“What I care about is who's gonna listen to me, whether they're in my party or not,” she said.

Eilers’ stance is characteristic of independent-minded voters in the Omaha-based 2nd District, colloquially named Nebraska’s “Blue Dot” for its support in recent years of Democratic presidential candidates in an otherwise deeply red state. The district is uniquely positioned as the most Democratic-leaning in the nation to have elected a Republican — Rep. Don Bacon — to the U.S. House. 

Bacon opted not to seek a sixth term this year after a decade in office. That has Democrats and Republicans scrambling to lay claim to the seat in a midterm election that will decide control of a nearly evenly split Congress.

Seeking to replace Bacon are fellow Republican and Omaha City Councilman Brinker Harding and a political newcomer, Democrat Denise Powell. Libertarian Eric Michael Foreman is also running. They’re vying to win one of the most competitive congressional seats in America.

The 2nd District was one of only three in the country where a majority of voters supported Democrat Kamala Harris for president in 2024 while also sending a Republican to Congress. That goes against the trend of districts voting consistently with presidential performance, making Nebraska’s 2nd District an outlier.

The Omaha-area district’s margin of victory was the widest, with Harris winning by 4.6 percentage points in a state that supported President Donald Trump by nearly 20 percentage points overall. The other two blue districts with Republican congressmen are in New York and Pennsylvania and saw Harris edge Trump by just a fraction of a percentage point.

Nebraska’s 2nd District also swung to former President Joe Biden in 2020 while sending Bacon back to Washington. In 2008, Omaha-area voters backed former President Barack Obama while also re-electing then-Republican Rep. Lee Terry.

“Nebraska’s 2nd District is the bluest district in the U.S. held by any Republican,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball, which has listed the Omaha district as leaning Democratic in the November election. The Cook Political Report also has the 2nd District House race leaning Democratic.

But those prognosticators have gotten it wrong before. Kondik acknowledged that Crystal Ball wrongly predicted in the last congressional election that Democrat Tony Vargas would unseat Bacon. Bacon instead eked out a win by less than 2 percentage points, continuing a trend of tight election outcomes in the district. It’s proof that election play-calling in Nebraska’s Blue Dot is no easy feat, Kondik said.

Bacon was able to hold on to the seat by taking a more centrist position in a Congress that has grown profoundly partisan in recent election cycles. Bacon — who has gained national attention by publicly criticizing some of President Donald Trump’s policies — blamed that partisanship, in part, for his decision not to seek re-election. 

But Democrats suggest it’s also likely that he feared defeat at the ballot box this year following his unpopular vote backing a Republican budget bill that slashed Medicaid funding by more than $500 billion over the next 10 years and ended popular pandemic-era health care insurance subsidies, sending many households’ premiums soaring.

Even so, a long-term incumbent usually carries more weight in elections.

“I think if Bacon were running again, we probably would have this race as a toss-up,” Kondik said. “I think, generally speaking, you’d rather have an incumbent in a seat like this — particularly one who’s been a pretty good electoral performer like Bacon.”

Crystal Ball is relying on a number of factors that it believes make the Omaha district ripe to flip this election. They include the slim margins of victory in recent years, polls showing low approval ratings for Trump and his policies — including tariffs and the Iran war — and various special and statewide elections across the country in the last year in which Democrats have overperformed.

There’s also been a recent swing in local Omaha politics, with Democrat John Ewing ousting longtime incumbent Republican Jean Stothert as mayor last year. 

Much of the 2nd District’s swing status can be attributed to its closely divided voter makeup. While the district overall has migrated slightly left in the last two decades, registered Republicans still hold an advantage, with 37.6% of the electorate to Democrats’ 34.1%. 

But that leaves nearly 30% of registered voters who are either independent or third-party voters, making that group highly sought after by the candidates.

Former Republican Omaha Mayor Hal Daub, who represented the 2nd District in Congress in the 1980s, is confident 2nd District voters will send Harding to Washington this election, but he agreed that the candidates’ need to appeal to independent voters can’t be overstated.

Nebraska's history of prairie populism, which champions struggling family farms and the working class, still influences voters in the 2nd District to prioritize individuals over political parties, he said.

“There is still this principle that ‘I vote for the person, not for the party,’” Daub said. “And I think that tends to fertilize the more independent nature of the district.” 

The 2nd District race’s frontrunners, Harding and Powell, are well aware of the need to draw independent voters. While the main candidates for statewide races, such as governor and the U.S. Senate matchup, have aggressively gone on the attack against their opponents and strongly sided with or against Trump, Powell and Harding have made a concerted effort to appeal to voters across party lines. Both have made affordability a centerpiece of their platforms, and both have vowed to back restricting the ability of congressional members to trade stocks.

Both candidates’ national parties have also jumped in the battle for the seat. The House Republicans’ main super PAC, Congressional Leadership Fund, announced earlier this year that it had reserved $2.2 million in political advertising time for the 2026 general election, with more to come as the election nears. House Speaker Mike Johnson came to Omaha this summer to campaign for Harding and made clear to supporters how important the 2nd District is in the midterms.

“Nebraska’s 2nd District is key to us holding the majority,” Johnson said.

But Democrats aren’t letting their best opportunity in a decade to flip the seat slip by unchallenged. The party’s main House super PAC, House Majority PAC, announced in April nearly $3 million in campaign ad buys for the general election in hopes of electing Powell.

Eilers, the veterans advocate, is a registered Democrat, but has crossed party lines before to vote for Republicans. That includes Bacon, whom she voted for because he was an Air Force veteran. But she doesn’t think he has taken her concerns about operating policies at Omaha’s VA hospital seriously. 

This year, none of the House candidates has her full-throated support. She’s reluctantly voting for Powell, as she says Powell has shown some concern over a January report by the Veterans Affairs Department’s inspector general that substantiated some of Eilers’ complaints about the hospital’s care of mental health patients. She also hopes Democratic control of Congress could help with other concerns she has.

“Affordability, healthcare, pushing back against ICE, you know, getting President Trump under control, ending this illegal war in Iran; like, just all of it,” she said. “I think those things matter to most people in Omaha.”

Daub said he thinks Harding’s deep Omaha roots going back four generations and his extensive work on Omaha development projects – from the downtown CHI Health Center to the West Dodge Expressway and eastern Omaha streetcar project currently under construction – give him a significant advantage at the polls.

“It’s well known that if you wanted to get anything done in this town, Brinker was the go-to council member to get advice and direction and to get things done,” Daub said. “And he’d give it to you, regardless of your party.”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/red-blue-or-purple-unique-omaha-area-congressional-district-draws-national-election-spotlight/