An election forecaster moved Nebraska’s contentious Senate race slightly toward Sen. Deb Fischer’s (R) challenger, Independent candidate Dan Osborn.
Sabato’s Crystal Ball shifted the Senate contest from “likely Republican” to “leans Republican” on Thursday, referencing the internal polling that shows Osborn being “competitive” with the two-term incumbent.
“Fischer has led by single-digit margins in her own publicly-released internal polling, while Osborn has produced a flood of internal polls showing him leading, most recently a 48%-46% lead in a Change Research poll (interestingly, his leads have been bigger in some of his other released polls),” Sabato’s Crystal Ball managing editor Kyle Kondik and associate editor J. Miles Coleman wrote in an update released Thursday .
Kondik and Coleman mentioned the recent involvement of the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), a super PAC with links to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), in the race.
“In recent weeks, SLF has upped its involvement in Senate races that we viewed as more fundamentally marginal—such as Michigan and Wisconsin—so their buy in Nebraska suggested to us that the race there also may be more competitive than Likely Republican,” they wrote.