OMAHA, Neb. (AP) – When Ben Sasse hearing that GOP activists in Nebraska preferred to condemn him for not supporting Donald Trump adequately, the Republican senator did not try to talk them out of it. Instead, he first punched.
In a five-minute video posted on Facebook and YouTube, Sasse shook fellow Republicans for pursuing a ‘cult of personality’ and ‘acting like politics is religion’.
This is the apology approach Nebraskans expected – and even appreciated – from their junior senator, who perhaps more than any other emerging Republican leader cultivates anti-Trumpism as his trademark.
Sasse said Trump’s allegations of election fraud were ‘lies’ and that Trump ‘chased’ a crowd on the Capitol on January 6 when Congress voted to confirm Joe Biden’s victory in the election. Sasse is one of the small group of Republicans most likely to vote to convict Trump on the charge of inciting an uprising during the Senate trial conclude.
Sasse’s criticism of Trump angeres many activists in Republican Nebraska. But Sasse also gains respect for expressing his opinion, even if it is unpopular, a trait that, according to some Republicans, reminded them of the former president himself.
“I’d rather he says what he sees and what he thinks,” said Tracy Fackler, an owner of Omaha auto repair shops. Like many people across the country, he voted for Trump for the same reason.
Sasse, who was elected to a second term of six years last year, does not have to worry much about the consequences of his anti-Trump campaign in a state that Trump won by 18 percentage points in November. The immediate risk for Sasse is how his votes on accusations will go to Republicans if he is elected president in 2024.
Of the small number of Republican senators who have joined the Democrats on indictment, only the 48-year-old Sasse is considered to still hold a higher office. He actually bets that there is a political future to try to fight for the return of the established Republican party.
“We still agree on some big things,” he said in his video, pointing to values his party has often promoted before Trump. “Rule of law. Constitutionalism. Limited government. ”
Even in Nebraska, Sasse has reason to think there is a market for what he sells.
He garnered nearly 27,000 more votes than Trump in the state, which appears to be better at holding stubborn GOP voters and winning Democrats. Twenty-one percent of Nebraska Democrats supported Sasse, while only 4 percent supported Trump, according to AP VoteCast, a poll among voters. Meanwhile, 7% of Republicans voted for Biden, while 3% of Republicans voted for Sasse’s challenger, Democrat Chris Janicek.
Sasse benefited from a scandal that hit Janicek. But the incumbent also showed strong in suburbs in suburban Omaha, which was similar to the presidential suburbs of the battlefield where Trump lost ground last year.
“I think he’s just a man who stands up for common principles and values and does not go along with Trump,” said Mike Lewis, a 56-year-old real estate agent from South Omaha and a registered Democrat for 30 years. . call himself a moderate. “I believe he is a man of morals and principles, not party lines.”
It’s a diverse, older suburb of neighborhoods and small businesses – none other than pockets of workers and middle-class voters just outside Milwaukee, or St. Louis. Paul, Minn. Omaha’s once thriving farms are just a mile east and steam is rising on top from Nebraska Beef and other smaller meat packers.
While scraping ice off his sidewalk a few blocks further, he also praised Sasse for ‘pronouncing his piece’.
“It was not popular what he said because he said it. “Everyone else just shoots around and he just said it like it was,” Fackler said, adding that he was an infrequent voter until Sasse in 2014 and Trump was running two years later. “If you take on the party, you’re going to be very critical.”
A block from here, Leah Fontenelle defies the singles on her front drill with Fackler.
“I’d rather have someone’s opinion than just bow before the party,” said the 65-year-old retired medical supply director who voted for Trump. “The party does not speak for everyone.”
But his elected officials must represent the party’s position, Kolene Woodward said.
More than 450 miles west, the Scotts Bluff County GOP chairman became furious with Sasse in mid-January after the senator said Trump “consistently lied by claiming he won the election ‘a rush’ and that the then president ‘left its duty to defend the Constitution and uphold the rule of law ”during the siege of the Capitol.
“He made such a public spectacle of his hatred for President Trump. And it’s not like Nebraska feels, ”Woodward said. She described Sasse as “Oh, just as disrespectful to the former president.”
Three other provincial IDP committees voted to disregard Sasse. The Republican Central Committee is expected to consider at least eight separate decisions to reprimand him when it meets next month.
Several other Republicans encountered similar scuffles at home, including representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Fred Upton of Michigan and Tom Rice of South Carolina.
Sasse’s criticism of Trump is not the only complaint the Republicans have against the senator. Some Republicans grumble about his professorial style. Sasse holds a degree from Harvard and Yale, and later became president of Midland University, a Christian school in eastern Nebraska.) Critics also say that during his six years in office, Sasse did not pass legislation for an exhibition. led or regularly experienced fundraising of parties. .
During his campaign in 2014, Sasse repeatedly said he identified more as conservative as a Republican.
The sentiment came through in the video that Sasse released on February 4th. He threw malicious members of the GOP committee because they were not only a few in the committee itself, but also with other Republicans of Nebraska and, even greater, Nebraska voters.
The “purification of” Trump skeptics “would be” terrible for our party “, he said, calling on them to focus on shared conservative principles again.
This could persuade Lewis, the self-described moderate Democrat, to support Sasse on the national stage.
“I do not agree with him all the time,” Lewis said. “But I agree with his principles and willingness to have an opinion.”