John Cavanaugh Against the World
OMAHA, NEBRASKA – The owners of the Underwood Bar would probably take pride in hearing it called a dive bar. The decor is spartan, with a pool table and a jukebox and old photos of regulars lining the walls. Some of those same regulars sat at the bar, kidding and laughing their way through a Friday happy hour.
But they weren’t enjoying a cold Miller Lite, or a Coors, or a PBR. Those beers were banned.
That’s because they are distributed by Premier Midwest Beverage, which Teamsters Local 554 has been striking since February 2. Premier, formerly a mom-and-pop organization in Omaha, was bought out by Glazer’s Beer and Beverage, a Southwestern conglomerate that immediately moved to reduce wages and benefits. “Everything in our proposal was red-lined out,” said Chris Carson, one of the lead negotiators. “We didn’t even finish the meeting, we said, ‘Fuck this.’” Bars and restaurants like the Underwood have supported the workers and put pressure on Premier by rejecting their products, which are now being distributed by scabs.
It’s an example of the robust labor movement in Omaha, a coalition of Teamsters and electricians and steamfitters who have combined with an educated population to trend the city away from Nebraska’s historic conservatism and toward the Democrats. The state splits its electoral votes by congressional district, and Nebraska’s Second, which includes Omaha, was the only territory in the 2024 presidential election contested by both candidates that Kamala Harris won. Democrats have taken the Second in three of the past five elections, and the city wears its pride in signs outside shops and homes featuring a single image: the Blue Dot.
It’s filtering down to the local level as well: Democratic Mayor John Ewing beat a 12-year Republican incumbent last year. “We’re able to bring people together around commonsense issues,” Mayor Ewing told the Prospect.
But despite this presidential success going back to Barack Obama in 2008, at the House level, the Second District has been represented by a Democrat for only one two-year term in the past 30 years. Moderate Republican Don Bacon has held the seat since 2017. But he’s retiring, giving Democrats hope that they will flip the most Democratic-leaning seat currently held by a Republican, a key step in regaining the House majority. “I’m very confident whoever the nominee is will be able to deliver that seat,” said Precious McKesson, executive director of the Nebraska Democratic Party.
The expectation of a blue wave has ramped up competition in the Democratic primary, which will be held on May 12. There are five candidates, but two have raised the most money: state Sen. John Cavanaugh, a Nebraska native whose family roots in politics go back 50 years and who is relying on small-dollar donations; and Denise Powell, who is a Nebraska native as well, but also relying on financial support from several Democratic PACs and outside groups.
Republicans are attempting to choose their opponent. The American Action Network, effectively an arm of House Speaker Mike Johnson and GOP leaders, is running ads in the district ironically tying Cavanaugh to Trump, because he endorsed a “no tax on tips”–style bill at the state level last year. The investment signals that Republicans want no part of Cavanaugh in November.
Yet the biggest point of discussion in the race is whether Cavanaugh is putting the sacred Blue Dot at risk. He would have to resign his seat in Nebraska’s unicameral legislature—all state legislators are senators—if he won election to the House, and Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen would get to appoint a Republican in his place for the next two years. Cavanaugh has dismissed this claim as lacking context, arguing that Democrats will offset his loss in the legislature by picking up seats. As I will discuss below, Republicans already have a supermajority in the legislature.
Up against nearly $2 million in outside spending, Cavanaugh is relying on his history of public service and ties with local labor unions to win the nomination. That’s why his canvass event last Friday kicked off at Underwood Bar, the one boycotting the union-busting beer distributor.
“I’M TRADITIONALLY A MILLER LITE GUY, but that’s one of the [boycotted] beers,” Cavanaugh told me as his campaign staff greeted a small group of canvassers. “But you know, the big thing about Miller Lite versus Busch Light is you can’t tell the difference.”
As the Prospect has reported, Cavanaugh is political royalty in Nebraska. His father John J. Cavanaugh III held the Omaha House seat from 1977 to 1981, and his sister Machaela has another one of the 49 spots in the unicameral legislature, where more than 13 percent of the Democratic caucus is a Cavanaugh.
You can sense in Cavanaugh, who is endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a desire for taking on lost causes: Before entering the extreme Democratic minority in Lincoln, he spent seven years as a public defender. The part-time legislature only pays $5 an hour, worse than the pitiful federal minimum wage. Now this penchant for windmill-tilting is turning to Congress. “I am a person who thinks that if you can do good, you should try to do good,” he said. “And I’ve been able to pass some good stuff that, you know, actually has helped people’s lives … it’s never going to get better if the only people who run for Congress are the people who look at it and think, that looks great!”
All of the bills Cavanaugh has been able to pass in the legislature needed significant Republican support, yet all of them have that Paul Wellstone prairie populist quality of making things more bearable for ordinary citizens. He is fond of touting a bill he passed to repeal the tax on diapers, benefiting working families that are financially stressed from raising children. Another Cavanaugh-authored law enabled the city of Omaha to create an incentive fund for affordable housing construction. This year, he passed a first-time homebuyer savings account, akin to a 529 account for college education, only for down payments. And he advanced a law enrolling everyone coming out of prison into the state Medicaid program for a period of six months.
“Concretely lowering costs of everything in people’s lives is what affordability means to me,” Cavanaugh said.
Beyond cost of living, Cavanaugh has prioritized making Congress a coequal branch again, arguing that overseas wars or tariffs should not be imposed without congressional approval. He’s not exactly fiery, but you get a sense of purpose, of doing what it takes to make progress. In fact, it was that impulse that gave Republicans an opportunity to paint this earnest liberal as a Trump supporter.
The bill cited in American Action Network’s digital ad, LB932, would eliminate taxes on tips and overtime in state income taxes. The AAN ad says this would “enact Trump’s policy” and “exactly mirror” the Trump Big Beautiful Bill no tax on tips. Cavanaugh says he introduced the bill, which has not yet passed, because “if we’re going to give tax breaks we should be focused on people who are working hard.” His bill would extend those tax breaks permanently, while Trump’s no tax on tips and overtime (which was actually a tax credit and didn’t eliminate those taxes fully) was temporary.
But regardless of the explanation, Cavanaugh said the intent from Republican groups was clear: “I think that the way they’re spending money indicates that they would like to run against anyone but me.”
THE FIVE MAIN CONTESTANTS IN THE SECOND DISTRICT Democratic primary are Cavanaugh, Powell, Douglas County Clerk of Courts Crystal Rhoades, Navy veteran and former VA official Kishla Askins, and progressive first-time candidate Melanie Williams, who just got in the race a month ago and has raised a grand total of $2,000. Rhoades has the support of Mayor Ewing, and Askins has been running on her military and health care experience. But Powell and Cavanaugh have much more cash on hand, and if yard signs can be an indication, more support in the district.
At a recent candidate forum, Powell stressed her biography—her mother’s from Cuba and her father’s from Chile—and her work as a small-business owner. She founded a political organization called Women Who Run Nebraska to get women elected across the state and work on policy issues. “I’m not a politician, I’m a working mom who loves this community,” Powell said.
Despite this outsider positioning, Powell is benefiting from several establishment Democratic campaign groups. She’s been endorsed by the New Democrat Coalition Action Fund, which represents the centrist faction in Congress. Women Vote, which is a subsidiary of EMILYs List, a member PAC called Elect Democratic Women, and BOLD PAC, which is affiliated with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, have launched a $1 million ad campaign supporting Powell. The initial ads attack ICE, aligning with the message in Powell’s own ads.
The candidate also has support from a super PAC called Fight for Nebraska PAC, which has raised $1.2 million as of the end of March and recently disclosed that the money came from three other PACs: the Western Futures Fund, Way Back PAC, and The Bench. The latter is affiliated with Democratic political operative and former Andrew Cuomo consigliere Lis Smith; Way Back PAC has an eclectic mix of endorsements.
Powell has a red box on her website, a way that candidates loosely coordinate with outside groups, asking to amplify her message of “fighting back against MAGA extremists” and taking on ICE. The red box is unusually specific, citing precisely what demographics of voters to target with mail (“Registered Democrats who voted in 1 of the last 3 primaries”) and digital ads (“YouTube targeting ages 35+ district-wide … 15s video on Meta and nonskip 15s and 30s video on YouTube”).
All told, the efforts in support of Powell and attacking Cavanaugh total $1,904,952 thus far, with more likely to come.
It’s not clear where this cash fire hose will lead. Cavanaugh led in public polling back in January, and the internal poll from March that Powell is touting shows her in the lead only “after voters hear both candidates’ messages,” a highly suspicious phrase that assumes perfect knowledge among the electorate. Numbers for the initial ballot test, revealingly, were not provided.
But Powell and others are banking on tearing Cavanaugh down by highlighting the pride of Omaha: the Blue Dot.
IT IS TRUE THAT IF CAVANAUGH WINS ELECTION to the House, he would have to resign his seat in the legislature. Under Nebraska vacancy law, Gov. Pillen would get to appoint a replacement in his blue Omaha senatorial district. That would likely put an additional Republican in the legislature, making a filibuster (one-third of the legislature, or 17 out of 49, can block passage of a bill) more difficult in a state that almost passed a six-week abortion ban, added additional voting rights restrictions, and overturned the method of choosing electoral votes that allows Democrats to win the Second District at the presidential level.
One ad from Powell allies Elect Democratic Women takes aim at this directly. “If John Cavanaugh wins, Nebraska women lose,” the ad intones, claiming that Pillen’s replacement would put the state over the top on an abortion ban. And Powell’s red box cites this possibility too, that the result of a Cavanaugh win “jeopardize[e] the Blue Dot,” as Republicans would commence with “expanding their supermajority and giving Republicans the votes they need to complete Trump’s redistricting power grab and eliminate the swing district that has given Democrats an electoral vote in the last two presidential elections.” Operatives even got Politico to write about this situation.
But there’s a lot of the story missing. First of all, as Powell’s red box intimates, Republicans already have a supermajority. The reason they can’t get rid of the Blue Dot is that several Republicans in the Omaha area oppose the change. Nebraska Republicans also couldn’t muster the votes to redistrict the state, despite their numbers.
On the abortion ban, school funding, voting rights, and other issues, in theory a one-vote gain in the legislature would get Republicans closer to passage. But that assumes that the balance of power will stay the same after a likely Democratic wave election in November. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee is targeting seats in Nebraska for the first time in decades, and the state party is contesting five legislative seats. “We are really working hard to make sure that we have more than 17 elected in the next session,” said McKesson, from the state Democratic Party. “It’s not just Democrats, we’ve had more rural farmers and Republicans that are coming to our town halls and asking, ‘How do we combat this?’”
Finally, if Republicans somehow did undo the Blue Dot and revert back to winner-take-all on electoral votes, Democrats who control Maine, the other state that apportions by electoral district, have said they would do the same thing, eliminating the opportunity for Republicans to pick up the rural Second District in that state. So it would likely be a wash.
“The people who are pushing this as an issue, they know better,” Cavanaugh told me. “I think we have a great shot to win four or five seats this year … so they’re being dishonest about that.”
THE NAACP CANDIDATE FORUM IN NORTH OMAHA, one of the few communities of color in a largely white district, was not well attended considering it was less than a month to the primary. “Some people feel like it doesn’t matter what they do,” one of the organizers told me ruefully. He was concerned that a divisive primary could deny the unity needed to defeat Republican Omaha city councilor Brinker Harding in the general election.
But the forum itself was relatively muted. Cavanaugh, the only elected official in the race, stressed his experience and that bill eliminating taxes on diapers. Powell stuck to affordability issues and the need to restore democracy. Rhoades mentioned her working-class background and supported investment in infrastructure. Askins highlighted health care as a practitioner and military issues as a Navy veteran. And Williams, who seemed to have little knowledge of Congress (asked about committees, she said “anywhere the Squad wants me to go,” and she admitted being “bad at answering questions”), was primarily concerned with decrying the lack of will among Democrats and the need to tackle “real issues.” Williams spoke to that apathy, noting an old CNN piece on poverty in North Omaha and how “somehow, nothing ever changes … government hasn’t worked for the people as long as I’ve been alive.”
There were questions about public safety, poverty, opposing the Trump agenda, and a local coal plant in North Omaha that Cavanaugh said needed federal dollars to decommission. But the fireworks were reserved for the airwaves. The experience of being hammered with millions of dollars in ads has led Cavanaugh to prioritize campaign finance reforms. “We need to get the dark money out of politics, we need structural changes on campaign finance,” he told me.
Before he ran out to knock doors, a regular from the Underwood came up to him, and he was definitely a few beers in. He was a foreman in commercial construction, and Cavanaugh immediately offered that he’s supported by the building trades unions, along with the state AFL-CIO and several other labor groups. But the foreman, who said he regularly votes, despaired that nothing ever changes, whether it was the bad roads or the struggles to make ends meet.
It was a little amusing seeing Cavanaugh try to calmly win this inebriated guy over by talking to him about the benefits of a progressive tax code. But then he said something that spoke to that alienation, something you don’t hear a lot from a politician: “You deserve to have someone representing you that makes you feel like things can change.”
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