Nebraska
Nebraska reaction to Biden-Harris decision focuses on 2nd District impact
LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – Local efforts to keep the Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District blue will have a new standard-bearer after President Joe Biden on Sunday announced he would not run for re-election and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee.
Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, issued a statement Sunday expressing deep respect for Biden’s work and for his decision to step aside. Democrats are preparing for the national convention in Chicago next month. Nebraska is sending 34 delegates to the convention.
Precious McKesson, representing the state party and the local Biden campaign, said the party is waiting on the national rules committee to clarify the nomination selection process and working with Democratic National Committee lawyers on securing ballot access for the nominee.
“I don’t think it changes anything,” McKesson said of Biden’s decision. “I think it re-energizes. … Our delegates were already pledged delegates to Joe Biden. I am confident they will be pledged to Vice President Harris.”
Vargas-Bacon race impact
Kleeb said local partisans will be laser-focused on helping Democratic State Sen. Tony Vargas of Omaha win his competitive congressional race against Republican U.S. Rep. Don Bacon of Papillion and on helping the Democratic nominee for president win the state’s “blue dot.”
Biden won the Omaha area’s single Electoral College vote in 2020. Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, won it in 2016 and won Nebraska’s four other electoral votes in 2016 and 2020.
The 2nd District has been Nebraska’s most competitive for years, flipping between then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama in 2008 to Mitt Romney in 2012.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen and the Nebraska Republican Party want to switch the GOP-leaning state to winner-take-all as soon as a special session this summer if he can find the votes. Nebraska is one of two states that awards an Electoral College vote to the presidential winner in each congressional district.
In a tweet overnight Sunday, the state GOP said “the figureheads may change,” but that the “radical agenda of the elitists behind these individuals who need public praise and recognition will not.” The tweet said the GOP must push a “positive” policy agenda.
Eric Underwood, the state GOP chairman, said Republicans “are all on the same page” with the national GOP, which has questioned whether Democrats risk angering their primary election voters and compounding their problems while Republicans rally around Trump.
Political observers say both the presidential race and the control of the House of Representatives could come down to the Omaha-area race. Vargas lost to Bacon by three percentage points in 2022. In 2020, Biden beat Trump in the district by six points.
Vargas, in a statement, thanked Biden for “his longtime leadership and honorable service.” He said his “selfless decision to step aside” will ensure the Democrats have a “strong nominee” who can win and serve the nation “capably” over the next four years.
“Our greatest imperative this fall is to ensure we beat Trump,” Vargas said. “That’s why I will support the Democratic nominee. The stakes of this election are incredibly high, with the risk of a second Trump presidency doing incalculable harm to our democracy, rights and freedoms.”
Bacon, in a statement, said Biden made the right decision for national security to step down. Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general, said the last presidential debate showed Americans that Biden was no longer up to serving as commander in chief.
“Unfortunately, Father Time always wins in the end, and it will happen to all of us at some point,” Bacon said in a post on the social media network X.
He also criticized Vargas for waiting so long to comment on Biden after the debate.
Love, Ricketts, Osborn weigh in
Preston Love Jr., the Democratic nominee running against Republican U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts, issued a statement commending Biden for his “many years of public service.” He said he looked forward to “strongly supporting Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee” for president.
“Our focus must continue to be on preventing Donald Trump and his enablers … from winning in November,” Love said. “A second Donald Trump presidency would be devastating to our most vulnerable communities. Now is the time for us to come together and find a path to victory.”
Ricketts, in a statement, said only one choice, Trump, will lead to “security and prosperity for American citizens, and that’s a Trump-Vance administration.” He stressed Harris’ role as the Biden administration’s point person on border security and said she pushed for “terrible policies.”
“The strength of the Trump-Vance ticket has never been more evident than today,” Ricketts said on X. “Kamala Harris owns the Biden policies.”
Dan Osborn, a nonpartisan candidate for U.S. Senate against Republican U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer, tweeted that he respects Biden’s decision. He said most Nebraskans want “honest leadership who will stand up to corruption regardless of party.”
Fischer’s campaign had no immediate comment on the Biden-Harris news.
A new old role for convention delegates
In August, 4,000 or so delegates from across the country will shift from having a largely ceremonial role, which was expected after Biden won the Democratic primaries, into a much higher-profile role of selecting the Democratic presidential nominee on behalf of their respective states.
Picking a presidential nominee was old hat for major party convention delegates prior to 1972, when the modern primary election system emerged. But Biden becomes the first presumptive nominee from a major party to leave the race after winning his party’s primary elections.
State Sen. Carol Blood of Bellevue is one of the delegates who will get to vote in Chicago. She is a candidate for Congress in the 1st District against Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Flood.
Her first national party convention is now expected to name a nominee, which she said has her “very excited” because of the number of “very qualified people who could step up to the plate.” She said she is hopeful that “maybe a woman could be one of them.”
“This is a whole new process,” Blood said. “It’s democracy at its finest.”
McKesson said the party hopes to have more answers Monday about the next steps for its convention delegates.
Could boost youth turnout
Retired University of Nebraska at Omaha political scientist Paul Landow, who cut his teeth helping with Omaha-area Democratic campaigns, said it is too soon to tell how Biden’s dropping out might impact the presidential or House races in the 2nd District.
Harris, if chosen, could help the party better motivate young people to vote this November, Landow and McKesson said. Landow pointed to recent polling that showed Trump faring worse against a younger, more progressive Democrat than against Biden. Trump still narrowly led, however.
McKesson said she hopes people will take a little time to thank Biden for his decades of work and for “what had to be a hard decision for him and his family.”
“I want everybody to think about what he has done,” she said.
Nebraska Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on Facebook and X.
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Copyright 2024 KOLN. All rights reserved.
GRAND ISLAND, Neb. (KSNB) — Children across Nebraska can get free meals during the summer months through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Program.
The Olinger family is one of many families getting free meals while school is out. Mikayla Olinger said the program helps save money on groceries.
“It helps a lot,” Olinger said. “Oh yes, especially with the three boys and now my daughter is starting to eat big food.”
Oscar Garcia, director of food service at West Lawn Elementary, said the community struggles with food insecurity.
“Some kids don’t know where their next meal is coming from, that’s why it’s important we meet the need in our community,” Garcia said.
The program also provides a place for children to learn new skills. One parent said it teaches children how to use a cafeteria so they are prepared when they go for the first time.
“The bonus to that is that sometimes they may run into their classmates they haven’t seen in a couple of months,” Garcia said.
Another parent said the program keeps children active.
Garcia said he has a goal for 16,000 meals to be served this year. Meals are available for any child whether they are in the school district or not.
Meal locations and dates
Free summer breakfast and lunch will be available at the following locations:
- Dodge Elementary — June 2-July 17
- Howard Elementary — June 2-June 26
- Shoemaker Elementary — June 1-June 26
- Starr Elementary — June 1-July 17
- West Lawn Elementary — June 1-July 17
- Grand Island Senior High — June 2-June 27 (breakfast only)
Click here to subscribe to our KSNB Local4 daily digest and breaking news alerts delivered straight to your email inbox.
Copyright 2026 KSNB. All rights reserved.
Nebraska
Nebraska Public Service Commission approves controversial transmission line through the Sandhills
The Nebraska Public Service Commission on Tuesday approved a heavily disputed 220-mile Nebraska Public Power District transmission line through the Sandhills.
Commissioners were briefed that the limited scope of the vote wouldn’t stop the so-called R Project, but only delay it. It passed by a count of 3-1, with one commissioner present not voting.
Christian Mirch, representing eastern Douglas County, didn’t vote. Kevin Stocker, who represents Grand Island and everything to the west, voted against the project.
“I recognize that the Nebraska Public Service Commission has limited authority over transmission line projects and is not responsible for establishing Nebraska’s overall energy policy,” Stocker said, “but since this permit requires a vote from commissioners, I will state the reasons for my opposition. First and foremost, the entire project is in my district, and currently the project does not have total support from the landowners who will be directly impacted.”
Stocker said changing national energy policy and NPPD considering a nuclear power station raises questions about the $800 million R Project. He called on the utility to perform an updated assessment of the plans.
Amy Ballheh lives and ranches near Burwell. Fire sparking is a concern, and the record-breaking wildfires this spring are evidence of the risk, Ballheh said during the public comment period.
“When these lines are put up out in the middle of nowhere, the fire gets started before you can hardly see it, and then you can’t get to them because the hills are too sandy,” Ballheh said. “There’s too many low, wet grounds. It’s just very, very difficult, so that is a big concern to have it out in that grassland.”
Many landowners have not signed agreements with NPPD. Landowners cite the fragile nature of the Sandhills and how the project could endanger the whooping crane and American burying beetle.
Trent Lewis of Sherman County said the Sandhills are a key part of one of the largest grasslands in the world. He’s a co-op owner of NPPD but said the power company’s plan doesn’t add up.
“In the name of net carbon zero, [NPPD] wants to bring concrete, steel, and heavy machinery into the second-largest carbon sequestration area of the world and somehow believe that we’re making progress,” Lewis said. “Making progress for who and what?”
The Sandhills are “the Great Plains’ largest and most unspoiled grassland ecosystem,” a University of Nebraska-Lincoln article said in 2024.
The commission’s legal team said NPPD provided all the necessary infrastructure waivers with phone, internet and railroad companies nearby to move forward. Its attorney said the Public Service Commission is statutorily required to approve projects that meet requirements, like the R Project has.
This is the latest news in a 13-year case that’s heading to court for the second time, after permits were vacated following the first case in 2020.
A nonprofit called Preserve The Sandhills and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota seek a preliminary injunction in the U.S. Civil Court of Denver, where U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service personnel named in the case are based. The Fish and Wildlife Service approved a permit application filed by NPPD, which outlined a plan to minimize harm for the endangered American burying beetle, allowing the plans to move forward.
In a statement emailed to Nebraska Public Media News in April, a spokesperson for NPPD said the project “is desperately needed to improve reliability and reduce congestion on the Nebraska grid.” The utility said it followed all legal requirements in the Fish and Wildlife permitting process.
Nebraska
Keith Jacobshagen, famed prairie painter, finds essential and eternal in endless Nebraska sky – Flatwater Free Press
Several days each week for more than 50 years, Keith Jacobshagen got behind the wheel and drove into the countryside around his home in Lincoln, to look, to experience, to think and, most importantly, to draw and paint.
“I could not stay away from going out there and being absorbed into the space and the light and the landscape,” he said. “So it was a real lure to me that was strong.”
Unlike other landscape artists who capture obvious scenic glories of crashing ocean waves or snow-crested mountains, Jacobshagen has devoted his life to depicting what much of the rest of America calls flyover country and ignores: cornfields, treelines, grain elevators and vast, unimpeded skies.
For decades, he has been one of Nebraska’s best-known artists with works featured in scores of exhibitions across the state and the U.S. He has gained renown nationally as a chronicler of the Great Plains, with work featured in two influential museum shows that traveled the country.
“I really regard Keith as the most significant Plains or prairie painter today or then,” said the
exhibition’s curator, Joni Kinsey, “and he seemed to be doing more monumental works, and I don’t mean in terms of size but in terms of significance, that were truly in the category of sublime. His work just stood out.”
Now 84 years old and in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease, Jacobshagen is facing the reality that his painting days are largely behind him.
He is content to look back at what he calls a very satisfying career in which he produced more than 2,000 paintings, not to mention hundreds more drawings and original prints.
From May 15 through Aug. 16, he will be spotlighted in a solo show, “The Shape of the Prairie,” at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, Mo. And the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney is tentatively planning a Jacobshagen retrospective in 2027 that curator Karissa Johnson hopes will tour at least regionally and include an accompanying scholarly catalog.
Jacobshagen’s works have a singular look – a low horizon line with sometimes only loosely delineated features across the landscape and big, sweeping skies – delicate white clouds against a panorama of blue or the orange and slate gray of a sunset turning into night.
“Once you see a Jacobshagen, you wouldn’t mistake it for anyone else’s work,” said David Cateforis, a professor of art history at the University of Kansas. “He has a very distinctive style.”
The elevated point of view came from being a pilot. When he was in his teens, the Wichita, Kansas, native learned to fly from his father, who was a test pilot for Boeing during World War II.
As an adult, Jacobshagen would sometimes rent and fly planes and gliders around Lincoln for fun.
“Every time I’d get back in one piece,” he said, “I just felt grateful for getting to do that, to mix both my affection for the landscape in terms of drawing and painting in it and in terms of flying over it.”
Although Jacobshagen’s landscapes are rooted in specific times and places, his skies often verge into abstract-expressionism, with his gestural, free-spirited deployment of color and patterns.
In previous eras, landscape artists often felt compelled to fill up their compositions, but in keeping with her notion of “plain pictures” with its clever dual reference to the Plains and uncluttered scenes, Kinsey, a professor emerita in art history at the University of Iowa, argues that Jacobshagen avoids that approach.
“He’s got maybe grain elevators or other structures,” she said, “but they are so tiny that they don’t dominate, and what he allows to dominate is the vista – the flat horizon and sweeping sky, and definitely there is almost a kind of (Mark) Rothko effect.”
While he certainly knows well the centuries-long history of landscape painting, Jacobshagen has always made a point of keeping up with the ever-changing pulse of the art world. For years, he’d spend a week or two each summer in New York City viewing dozens of gallery and museum exhibitions.
It is this balance of past and present, of abstraction and realism, that gives his pieces a contemporary quality.
But Cateforis believes that like the great 18th- and 19th-century English landscape painter John Constable, the Nebraska artist is of his time but also manages to transcend it. “There is a sense of something that is kind of essential and eternal that Keith is finding in these humble Midwestern landscapes,” the art historian said.
Jacobshagen was born in Kansas in 1941 and has spent his entire life within a three-state area, nearly all of it in the Great Plains, the vast region of grasslands that stretches from Canada all the way south to Texas.
He first fell in love with the Plains landscape as a child, when he peered out the car window as he rode with his mother to airfields outside of Wichita to pick up his father from work. “There was something magical about what was around me that I somehow knew as special to me,” he said.
He went on to earn his bachelor’s degree from the Kansas City Art Institute and his master’s degree at the University of Kansas, where he studied with Robert Sudlow, a noted landscape painter who Jacobshagen called a “huge influence.”
The two would venture into rural areas around Lawrence and set up their easels 10 to 25 feet apart. He vividly recalls Sudlow yelling out in excitement as a change in light or some other natural phenomenon was occurring: “Geez, look at that blue!”
Jacobshagen would continue this practice throughout his career. He traveled into the landscape as often as five days a week, depending on his schedule at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he taught from 1968 through his retirement in 2008.
Before heading out in the morning, he would sit with a cup of coffee and look over aeronautical charts he used for flying or regular road maps.Sometimes, an intriguing town name like Rokeby or Saltillo or an unusual arrangement of a group of lakes would catch his eye. “Those kinds of things lured me out there like the sirens,” he said with a laugh.
He sometimes brought an easel with him, painting for two or three hours at whatever site he’d chosen and roughing out perhaps half of a composition. Then he’d finish it in his studio, relying on Polaroid photos he had taken at the same time and his memory.
Other times, he used orange, 5-by-7½-inch engineering notebooks to make sketches or jot down notes about the weather conditions or time of day, factoids that can sometimes even be found written in small letters along some of his drawings and small paintings.
“So, there is a specificity to his work at the same time there is a universality to it, and that again adds interesting layers of complexity,” Cateforis said.
For Jacobshagen, just taking in the landscape was as important as the final art work. “Being out there and absorbing the light and the temperature and the lovely sounds that go on out there and the terrific smells of a freshly turned field,” he said. “There is nothing better.”
Many of Jacobshagen’s drawings and paintings are small, but he has created larger-scale works as well, including “Crow Call (Near the River),” a twilight scene that measures about 4 feet tall and 6½ feet wide.
That panoramic piece was acquired in 1991 by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., and it was featured for a time on a postcard available in the institution’s shop.
It is not on view now but has hung in a place of honor in the museum director’s office since 2018.
“I got very charged up when I made that painting,” the artist said. “I made a lot of personal discoveries about how I was thinking of the process of painting.”
The big question surrounding Jacobshagen is legacy. In addition to his many exhibitions, he was represented by several New York galleries, including the prestigious, now-defunct Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, and he has works in more than 50 museum and corporate collections across the country.
But is that enough for him to be remembered in 50 or 100 years?
“I hope so,” Kinsey said. “I definitely hope so, because I think he has been all along one of the more astute artists of this distinctive landscape, and there are not a lot of them.”
It doesn’t help that Jacobshagen was not included in a 2019 book titled “Landscape Painting Now,” which featured more than 80 artists, or that his works are not in the collections of major museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York or Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Also working against him are the art world’s continuing coastal biases and lack of understanding and appreciation of the Plains landscape. That’s something that the influential 1996 show “Plain Pictures” strived to counter. Jacobshagen’s work was included in the exhibition, which opened at the University of Iowa Museum of Art and traveled to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and Omaha’s own Joslyn Art Museum. One of Jacobshagen’s paintings was featured on the cover of the show’s catalog.
But the reality remains: Landscape painting has never been at the forefront of 20th or 21st century art.
What’s not in question is the mastery of Jacobshagen’s work itself, which Cateforis believes has the transcendent quality that can match the great Dutch masters. “There is a sense of calm and serenity but also a sense of supreme accomplishment in the way he renders the sky, the land and the elements of the landscape,” he said. “There is a quiet assurance in the work.”
While the upcoming show in St. Joseph and the other planned by the Museum of Nebraska Art are important, what would significantly help Jacobshagen’s chances for a more lasting place in art history is a touring retrospective organized by a larger, more prominent institution.
That may happen, or it may not, but the artist himself professes to give little thought to his legacy.
He is sure of one thing: He has no regrets.
“Oh, no, none,” he said without hesitation. “I am content.”
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