Lots of rural analysis in NYT reporting on Nebraska primary

These excerpts are all from the New York Times feed on yesterday's primary in Nebraska.  West Virginia also held its primary yesterday, but few of the entries on that feed mentioned the rural-urban divide. 

By Reid Epstein at about 7:31 PM Pacific time:

State Senator Brett Lindstrom is running very strong in the early vote in Douglas and Lancaster counties, which include Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska’s two largest cities. Lindstrom, who appealed to moderates and party-switching Democrats, has nearly half the Douglas County vote, but his challenge will come in the state’s vast rural and far more conservative rural counties, which have not yet reported results.

From Epstein, just before the prior post:

If the Nebraska race is close, we will most likely be waiting on results from Sarpy County, just south of Omaha. Sarpy is the state’s third-largest by population and is transitioning from rural to suburban and exurban. It usually reports its results later than the rest of the state, and some recent elections have flipped based on the Sarpy results. And just before that, there was this:

In Nebraska's G.O.P. primary for governor, both the Pillen and Lindstrom campaigns are counting on doing well in Sarpy, Neb. Pillen because Ricketts has been strong there in the past and Lindstrom because his base is the more moderate suburban voters who have recently moved there from Omaha.

And just before that, there was this:

Another good sign for Brett Lindstrom: With 84 percent of the vote in, he’s leading in Dodge County, a rural area about 30 minutes from Omaha where Donald J. Trump won 65 percent of the vote in 2020. If that number holds, it’s bad news for both Jim Pillen and Charles W. Herbster, who are counting on winning the state’s rural areas.

And just before that, this:

As results from the rural Nebraska counties come in, Jim Pillen is about to take a lead over Brett Lindstrom. It will be difficult for Lindstrom, who is getting wiped out in the rural western counties, to come back given how much of the vote from his strongholds of Omaha and Lincoln are already reported.

And before that (say an hour earlier, though the time stamp is fuzzy), there was this:

Some of the same urban-rural divide that showed up in the Ohio Senate primary is clear in Nebraska’s governor’s race, with the more moderate G.O.P. candidate, Brett Lindstrom, winning the cities of Omaha and Lincoln and some surrounding areas but getting crushed everywhere else.

And before that, this

The Nebraska results map looks like a bizarro version of Neapolitan ice cream. Blue (for the moderate, Brett Lindstrom) in the state’s populous eastern counties, yellow (for the establishment candidate, Jim Pillen) in the middle and red, for the Trump-endorsed Charles W. Herbster, in the west.  [The west is the most rural part of the state]

Also of note is this piece by Ted Genoways in the New York Times yesterday, analyzing Trump's influence on Nebraska's politics, especially in relation to Trump's endorsement of big ag dude/conspiracy theorist Herbster.  Here's a paragraph from that essay that explicitly discusses rurality--and which makes an interesting assertion about Obama's role in the Nebraska mess:  

But Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, also attributes the extreme partisan vitriol to the Democratic National Committee’s decision to shift its resources away from rural red states like Nebraska, which was in part because Mr. Obama had slashed the committee’s resources.

“Obama hated the D.N.C.,” Ms. Kleeb told me, “because he feels like they stabbed him in the back” by supporting Hillary Clinton over his upstart campaign in the 2008 presidential primary. Distrustful of the Democratic machine — and the party brand — Mr. Obama turned fund-raising efforts away from the D.N.C. and focused on building “progressive” organizations like Organizing for America, she said. But that created two problems.