OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Republican Don Bacon has been elected to a fifth House term representing Nebraska’s Omaha-based 2nd District, following the latest vote results in the tight race released nearly three days after the polls closed.
Bacon fended off a strong challenge from Democratic state Sen. Tony Vargas in a rematch of their 2022 race to represent the Omaha area in Congress.
Bacon's victory is the latest race decided in favor of Republicans, who have projected confidence that they will keep control of the U.S. House, while Democrats continued to hold onto hope for a path toward the majority and sought assurances that every vote will be counted.
Bacon held a news conference a day after the election declaring victory and promising to meet the needs of both Republican and Democratic voters, noting the district is nearly evenly split politically.
“We couldn't have done this without split-ticket voters; we would have lost,” Bacon said Wednesday. “I recognize that.”
But Vargas initially declined to concede the tight race, with around 15,000 ballots left to be counted in Douglas County, where there are more registered Democrats than Republicans. Late Friday afternoon, the Douglas County Election Commission had counted more than 9,000 of the outstanding ballots, with the results slightly favoring Vargas, but not enough to make up his nearly 3 percentage-point deficit to Bacon recorded on Election Day.
Vargas conceded Friday about an hour after the new vote count was released, noting the results were not what his campaign had hoped for.
“This campaign has always been about giving a voice to working families and uniting our community,” Vargas said in a statement. “Throughout my career, I’ve worked across the aisle to help parents, seniors, and students, and I will continue that fight.”
Vargas had hoped to ride a wave of support for the Democratic presidential ticket that siphoned off a lone electoral vote tied to the district. But the district's support for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz — a Nebraska native — failed to translate into a win for Vargas.
Nebraska is one of two states — the other is Maine — that allows its Electoral College votes to be split. In Nebraska, the electoral votes tied to the state's three congressional districts go to the winner of the popular vote in each district. Nebraska’s 2nd District twice previously awarded its vote to Democratic presidential candidates — to Barack Obama in 2008 and to Joe Biden in 2020, and did so again Tuesday by backing Kamala Harris. Former President Donald Trump took the state’s other four electoral votes.
Mindful of the district's moderate makeup, both Vargas and Bacon sought to distance themselves from their parties’ partisan fringes in the run-up to the election and to woo the district’s sizeable independent and third-party voters. The district has leaned more to the left in the last two decades, despite Republican efforts to redraw its boundaries to favor their party.
Bacon touted his bipartisan credentials in his political ads, citing his willingness to buck his party to support measures such as the Biden administration’s popular 2021 infrastructure investment bill. But he also was careful to walk a fine line in the swing district, often turning to social media to tout his conservative stances — such as unwavering support for Israel in its war with Hamas and defending his vote against a bipartisan border security bill.
Douglas County Election Commissioner Brian Kruse said Thursday that his office had been busy in the aftermath of Election Day processing nearly 6,800 early ballots turned into his office or left in ballot drop boxes late Monday and on Election Day, as well as working through about 2,600 ballots that could not be read by vote-counting machines.
The reasons a ballot cannot be machine-read vary, Kruse said.
“It could be because somebody used a purple ink instead of blue or black. It could be because somebody put a checkmark instead of filling in the oval,” he said. “Maybe they spilled coffee on it and returned it rather than getting new pages.”
Kruse expected to finish counting the remainder of the ballots — including more than 5,500 provisional ballots — by end of day on Nov. 18, he said. The commission will certify the vote on Nov. 21.