The supposedly unbeatable Republican mayor of Nebraska’s largest metropolis used the GOP’s anti-LGBTQ+ playbook in her reelection bid. And misplaced!
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John Ewing pumps his fist after the second spherical of outcomes are introduced on the election night time watch get together for Ewing for Omaha mayor on the downtown Hilton in Omaha, Neb., Tuesday, Could 13, 2025.
(Chris Machian / Omaha World-Herald by way of AP)
Omaha Mayor Jean Stotherta Republican looking for reelection in one in all her get together’s few big-city strongholds, was purported to be unbeatable. She had gained her 2021 reelection bid for a 3rd time period with virtually two-thirds of the vote, and her 2025 marketing campaign coffers had been full of cash from company CEOs and billionaire donors. However Stothert knew she was working in a 12 months when President Donald Trump’s extremism and billionaire “particular authorities worker” Elon Musk’s damaging impulses had executed critical harm to the GOP model. Confronted with proof that Democrats in Nebraska’s largest metropolis and throughout the nation are extremely motivated to vote in 2025’s odd-year elections, and with indicators that the native marketing campaign of Democratic mayoral candidate John W. Ewing Jr. was surging, Stothert and her supporters seized on what GOP strategists hold imagining to be a profitable technique: transphobia.
With a marketing campaign primarily based on what Nebraska state Senator Megan Hunt described as “trans hate and discrimination,” Stothert’s backers delivered “a last-minute blitz of Republican anti-transgender propaganda.” A ultimate TV advert from the mayor’s camp claimed, “Ewing stands with radicals who wish to permit boys in women’ sports activities,” whereas a mailing from a pro-Stothert political motion committee recycled nationwide GOP speaking factors and instructed that Ewing desires to “transition minors with out their dad and mom’ consent.”
However guess what? The GOP technique failed. Massively. In what was broadly described as a significant upset—one which Democrats had been hailing as a hopeful signal that they will make progress in purple states as frustration mounts with Trump and Musk—Ewing scored a sweeping 56-44 victory over the incumbent. He’ll now turn out to be Omaha’s first Black mayor.
Ewing’s decisive victory despatched a robust sign in regards to the rising politics of 2025—and the restrictions of the GOP’s bigoted ways. “We have to perceive this as a victory in opposition to trans hate and discrimination,” declared Senator Hunt, who has led the combat in opposition to anti-trans measures within the Nebraska legislature. “Common Individuals don’t react to or obtain the decision to trans panic. Sufficient. We’re talking to the long run.”
The end result from Omaha, a heartland metropolis the place Republicans have traditionally been capable of maintain their very own politically, counters the narrative of GOP strategists who proceed to construct their campaigns round crude anti-trans messaging.
TV advertisements and mailings like those who focused Ewing had been utilized by Republicans and their conservative allies in races throughout the nation in 2024, and have turn out to be customary strains of assault on progressives working within the partisan and technically nonpartisan contests (such because the Omaha race) of 2025. However Stothert leaned particularly closely on them as points related to the municipal contest, saying“The mayor is completely 100% concerned with public bogs in our public areas, group facilities, golf programs, parks, and day camps.”
Present Challenge
Ewing, a retired deputy police chief, the affiliate minister of the town’s Salem Baptist Church, and the elected treasurer of surrounding Douglas County, countered Stothert’s concentrate on the problem by saying, “No person’s ever introduced that query up. So I consider it’s a made-up situation by Jean Stothert and the Republican Social gathering.”
However Ewing and his supporters didn’t merely name out the incumbent’s election-season scheming. The Democrat actively campaigned for the assist of LGBTQ+ voters, showing this month at an occasion sponsored by Nebraska Stonewall Democrats on the metropolis’s FLIXX Lounge & Cabaret Present Bar. And the dynamic Nebraska Democratic Social gatheringwhich is chaired by Jane Kleeb, an ally of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who was just lately elected as president of the Affiliation of State Democratic Committees, immediately and successfully countered the assaults on Ewing, “Whereas Mayor Stothert continues to make use of the identical drained Republican playbook to distract voters with cultural wars like specializing in bogs,” famous an announcement from get together govt director Valuable McKesson, “John Ewing continues to concentrate on actual points that influence individuals’s pockets—the infinite potholes, new financial growth, and housing that can assist Omahans, not Jean’s large donors.”
The Democratic message was strengthened on social media with a waggish picture of the mayor peaking below the door a WC stall, which featured the tagline“Jean is targeted on potties. John is targeted on fixing potholes.”
The distinction proved a robust one. Ewing gained large in a metropolis that’s on the coronary heart of a congressional district narrowly held by Republican US Consultant Don Bacon. Democratic Nationwide Committee chair Ken Martin famous after the Omaha outcomes had been introduced, “From coast to coast, from blue to purple to even purple states, Democrats are overwhelmingly outperforming Republicans in practically each election held this 12 months” and declared, “After tonight, weak Home Republicans like Don Bacon are on discover.”
All true. Additionally true was Kleeb’s remark {that a} big-spending anti-trans marketing campaign from a outstanding Republican and her allies was efficiently countered by “the inventive graphic and easy message (Nebraska Democrats) used to drive the purpose house that Dems are targeted on points households care about and that the GOP is out of contact.”
John Nichols
John Nichols is a nationwide affairs correspondent for The Nation. He has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on subjects starting from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Social gathering to analyses of US and international media programs. His newest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Occasions bestseller It is OK to Be Indignant About Capitalism.
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