Sen. Ben Nelson (D)

Last updated: January 5, 2012

Ben Nelson, a former two-term governor of Nebraska, was elected to the Senate in 2000. Though he has resisted entreaties to switch parties, he is the Senate’s most conservative Democrat and someone his party cannot take for granted on nearly every major vote. Nelson has announced that he will not run for re-election in 2012.

Nelson grew up in McCook, a small town that is also the birthplace of Willa Cather, whose novels powerfully depict frontier life on the Great Plains. Nelson graduated from the University of Nebraska, practiced law, served as state insurance director, and headed a major insurance company. He is a man of varied avocations. He has collected several hundred clocks, for instance, and is an avid hunter of turkeys and bears. In 1990, Nelson ran for governor, taking on Bill Hoppner, former staff aide to Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey, in the primary; he won by all of 42 votes. In the general election, he narrowly beat Gov. Kay Orr, 50%-49%. Orr had lost popularity after raising taxes.

As governor, Nelson built prisons, trimmed workers’ compensation payments, and reorganized the human services department. He cut property taxes and reduced income and sales taxes. His record won him high job ratings and re-election by 73%-26% in the strongly Republican year of 1994. When Nelson ran for the Senate in 1996, he led in polls most of the way, but then fell behind in October and lost to Republican Chuck Hagel, 56%-42%.

Early in 2000, Nebraska’s other Senate seat came open when Sen. Bob Kerrey, one of the Democratic Party’s national stars, made the surprise announcement he would not seek re-election. Nelson, then practicing law in Omaha, was the strongest possible Democratic nominee, and he entered the race in February. Attorney General Don Stenberg won the Republican primary, with 50% of the vote against five opponents. Nelson and Stenberg both opposed abortion rights and backed tax cuts. But they had significant differences in style and a long history of clashes. Stenberg ran as part of the “Bush-Hagel-Stenberg Team.” Nelson led from the start in the polls, and he raised and spent more money. The popular Kerrey also actively campaigned for his fellow Democrat. Nelson’s lead in the polls narrowed in October, but this time he won, 51%-49%.

Second only to Zell Miller of Georgia, Nelson turned out to be the Senate Democrat most likely to support President George W. Bush. He helped to broker the administration’s tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. In 2002, Nelson was one of the senators who put together a compromise to permit Bush to cancel collective bargaining rights for homeland security workers, although the measure also allowed future presidents to overturn the decision. Nelson generally supported Bush on the Iraq war, joining Republicans in March 2007 to oppose a plan to start troop withdrawals a year later. With moderate GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, he also authored benchmarks for Iraqi progress. Nelson joined Republicans again to turn back a proposal to restrict funds for Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, and shunned his party on global warming by criticizing legislation for setting what he called unrealistic deadlines for new technologies.

His Democratic colleagues tolerated these apostasies. As one said, “He needs to do what he needs to do to keep his seat” in one of the most Republican states in the nation. Nelson has stuck with his party in a few tough fights. He voted against the GOP’s Federal Marriage Amendment, for example, arguing that same-sex marriage was a state issue. He also was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for president after being impressed by the record audience that Obama drew at a 2006 Nebraska campaign event for Nelson. He often is found in the middle of battles between the extremes of both parties. In 2010, he supported the Democrats’ overhaul of financial regulation and repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy prohibiting openly gay service members.

Nelson backed President Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus and the health care reform law, though both issues landed him in controversy. He irked some members of his party when he refused to grant states aid for education as part of the stimulus. Though some education money was included in the final bill, he and Collins were able to trim about $110 billion overall from the measure, disappointing Democrats who had sought more spending. On health care, he was rejected in his bid to add strong anti-abortion language to the original Senate proposal, and indicated he would consider filibustering the bill. After a negotiating session lasting more than 13 hours in December 2009, he agreed to provide the crucial 60th vote. He won new abortion provisions enabling states to opt out of allowing plans to cover the procedure in the insurance exchanges the bill would set up.

More crucially, however, Nelson got an exemption from Nebraska paying its share of Medicaid’s expansion in the state, an estimated $100 million cost over the next decade. That provision sparked an uproar, with even Nebraska GOP Gov. Dave Heineman condemning the deal. Calling it the “Cornhusker kickback,” angry Republicans held it up as an example of the worst of Democratic backroom negotiating; it was seen as a partial factor in Democrat Martha Coakley’s surprise loss in a January 2010 special election for the seat held by the late liberal Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. After protesting that he never wanted Nebraska treated differently from other states, Nelson told Senate leaders that month to remove the provision.

Nelson displayed his independent-mindedness on other issues. In July 2010, he held up legislation to restore unemployment benefits for people out of work more than six months, joining Republicans who insisted that at least a portion of the spending be paid for by budget cuts elsewhere. He vowed to oppose a climate change bill containing a cap-and-trade program to limit carbon emissions, helping to scuttle the measure in the Senate. Though he backed Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 2009, he opposed Elena Kagan’s 2010 appointment, citing her lack of a judicial record.

During his first Senate term, Republicans tried to persuade Nelson to switch parties. According to the Omaha World-Herald, White House strategist Karl Rove in 2004 offered Nelson the job of Agriculture secretary; Nelson considered it for five days before declining. If he had accepted, then-Republican Gov. Johanns would have appointed his successor, allowing the GOP to pick up a Senate seat. Since then, Nelson has tamped down periodic speculation about his becoming a Republican. After the Democrats’ drubbing in the 2010 midterm elections, he told Nebraska’s KFAB radio: “I’m not looking to leave the party, and that’s why the party hasn’t left me.”

Nelson has focused much of his legislative work on home-state concerns. When the Great Plains were hit by a drought in 2002, he argued that affected areas should get disaster relief, just as states hit by hurricanes and floods do. He has been fighting for such parity ever since. The compensation, he maintains, would be for crops or livestock lost, rather than property destroyed. During debate of the 2008 farm bill, Nelson criticized a reduction in drought assistance and was vocally unhappy that fellow Nebraskan Mike Johanns quit as Agriculture secretary before passage of the bill. (Johanns returned home to run for Hagel’s Senate seat.) With Nebraska’s farmers in mind, Nelson in 2007 joined a bipartisan farm state group that secured an increase in ethanol production to 15 billion gallons by 2015.

With a seat on the Appropriations Committee, Nelson is able to direct federal dollars to Nebraska. His Senate website boasts of his earmarks for the state in defiance of critics who say that the often narrowly targeted special provisions in spending bills are wasteful. When Obama pledged in January 2011 to veto all legislative earmarks, he said it would hurt his state. “Rural states get hit hardest by the earmark ban. Period,” he told Nebraska reporters.

In 2006, Republicans put up Pete Ricketts, an executive with TD Ameritrade and a self-financing multimillionaire, against Nelson. Running on a platform of tax cuts and smaller government, Ricketts sought to appeal to traditional red state values. He supported a guest worker program for immigrants, allowing Nelson to position himself to the right of the Republican by making demands to seal the border. Ricketts supported private savings accounts as a first step in “modernizing” Social Security; Nelson opposed such accounts. Ricketts opposed spending earmarks in the federal budget, but Nelson backed them as vital to Nebraska. Ricketts spent more than $13 million, most of it from his own deep pockets. The combined $20 million-plus spending by the two candidates was roughly three times the previous record for a statewide contest in Nebraska. But the result wasn’t close. Nelson won 64%-36%, dominating in Omaha’s Douglas County, 65%-35%, and in Lincoln’s Lancaster County, 70%-30%. Ricketts won just 13 of 93 counties, all of them sparsely populated and west of the city of North Platte.

This seat was already going to be difficult for Democrats to hold in 2012. Now, with Nelson retiring, Democrats will need to find an attractive candidate who can appeal to conservative voters in this heavily Republican state. There has been some speculation that former Sen. Kerrey, D-Neb. would mount a bid to return to the Senate, but he has yet to show interest. Another possible Democratic candidate is Kim Robak, a former lieutenant governor who was appointed to that position by then-Gov. Nelson. On the Republican side, state Attorney General Jon Bruning and state Sen. Deb Fischer have already launched campaigns.