Voting in 2024 election showed a definite east-west, urban-rural divide

We're all glad the election is over and we're no longer subjected to wall-to-wall campaign ads on TV and radio.

The faster we can get back to watching "Green Acres" reruns the better!

But I can't get over how differently Nebraskans in the east, and Nebraskans in the west voted this year.

We might as well be two states – "East Cornhusker" and "West Cornhusker" (and I know several people who would prefer that).

Let's take the hottest race in the state, pitting incumbent U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer versus Omaha labor leader/welder Dan Osborn.

Osborn's "independent" campaign focused on his belief that Washington, D.C., was horribly broken, that Fischer was part of the problem, and you needed to elect a mechanic to fix it.

That message, fueled by out-of-state, Democrat-leaning groups seeking to replace incumbents, caught fire in the east. Osborn won handily in the state's two largest counties, Douglas and Lancaster, claiming 58% of the vote, and also won in Sarpy and Thurston counties.

But it was a whole other story outside of those eastern counties. 

Fischer, whose family ranches near Valentine, kicked some cowboy rear ends out west. In Scotts Bluff County, she won by almost a 2-to-1 margin, same in Buffalo County, home to Kearney, Adams County, where Hastings is located, and Lincoln County, home to North Platte. 

Fischer's margin of victory was even higher in McCook's Red Willow County (like 6-to-1) and more than 2-to-1 in the counties where Norfolk and Columbus are located.

The east-west divide was also evident in voting on the two competing abortion ballot measures.

Early on election night, it appeared that Initiative 439 was headed for victory. It was the proposed constitutional amendment backed by abortion rights groups to guarantee a right to abortion up to the point of viability (when a fetus could survive outside the womb).

By contrast, Initiative 434 was losing early in the evening. That ballot measure banned abortion after the first 12 weeks of gestation, enshrining current state law into the constitution, and it was crafted so that the legislature, if it chooses, could enact a stricter ban.

But Nebraska's "red wave" (as a pundit put it on Dan Parson's election night podcast) came through.

When the votes from rural areas of Nebraska began to roll in later in the evening – the so-called red wave – the tide shifted dramatically.

In the end, the state's most urban counties, Douglas, Lancaster and Sarpy, were the only ones to vote "yes" on Initiative 439. On Initiative 434, Douglas and Lancaster were the only counties to vote against it.

Initiative 434 won by a 2-to-1 margin and more in counties outside the state's two biggest counties, and 439 was lost by similar margins in rural areas.

After the votes were tallied, there was no need to determine which abortion initiative got the most "yes" votes because only Initiative 434 was approved by voters. It won by a margin of more than 90,000 votes; by contrast, Initiative 439 fell short by 22,000 votes. 

There's a definite pattern nationally. Generally, in more densely populated urban areas, there's more Democrats; in more wide-open rural areas, more Republicans. Some pundits explain it this way – in rural areas, people aren't as dependent on government to get things done, so they're more inclined to favor less government; in urban areas, government is relied upon haul away the garbage and downed tree limbs, there's more streets to fix and a police officer is only a couple minutes away. So they vote Democrat. 

I can see some of that. In addition, the Catholic Church preached hard against Initiative 439, and strongly urged those in the pews to vote "for" 434. In a state where 23% of people identify as Catholic, that helped.

In Texas, they refer to the State Capital of Austin as "The People's Republic of Austin," because it's a liberal bastion surrounded by Republican-red counties. Same in Wisconsin, where the Capital/college town of Madison is called the "People's Republic of Madison" because politics there are much more liberal there than rural areas of the Badger State. 

I'm not sure we're there yet in Nebraska. (Both urban and rural voters agreed that granting $10 million in public funds for private schools wasn't a good idea). 

But the recent election sure looked that way. 

Paul Hammel has covered the Nebraska state government and the state for decades. He retired in April as senior contributor with the Nebraska Examiner. He was previously with the Omaha World-Herald, Lincoln Journal Star and Omaha Sun. A native of Ralston, he loves traveling and writing about the state.