A wave of new political ads attacking Republican Sen. Deb Fischer and her independent challenger Dan Osborn have flooded the airwaves in Nebraska in recent weeks as the closer-than-expected race draws national attention and out-of-state dollars.

Heartland Resurgence, a Missouri-based political action committee that has spent millions over the past decade supporting conservative candidates, earlier this month spent $478,530 to run attack ads against Osborn, calling the former labor leader “Democrat Dan.”

The ad, which featured Osborn’s face along with cutout photos of national Democrats including Vice President Kamala Harris, aired multiple times in local television markets during the Husker v. Illinois football game on Sept. 20, which attracted 4.2 million viewers nationwide country.

A few days later, Osborn’s campaign released an ad showing a person resembling Fischer wearing a jacket emblazoned with the logos of some Fortune 500 companies, such as Goldman Sachs, whose executives had donated to Fischer.

Appearing in the ad, Osborn said the Senate is “made up of a bunch of millionaires controlled by billionaires,” calling Fischer “part of the problem.”

The ads — along with new polls and millions of dollars in additional ad buys from both campaigns, as well as a pair of progressive-funded PACs supporting Osborn’s populist push to unseat Fischer — prompted national observers to look at the race in a new light.

After an influx of spending and a new poll last week that showed Osborn leading Fischer by one point in the race, nonpartisan election analysis website The Cook Report on Wednesday changed its race forecast from “Solid Republican” to “Likely Republican.” . — which suggests the race is more competitive than previously thought.

Fox News also moved its forecast a step toward Osborn, a U.S. Navy veteran who is seeking to become the first non-Republican elected to the Senate in Nebraska since 2006.

The decision came after a nonpartisan pollster employed by Osborn’s campaign polled 558 likely Nebraska voters last week and found that 45% planned to vote for Osborn compared to 44% for Fischer, a former state legislator and rancher from Valentine , who is seeking a third term in the presidential elections. Senate.

The poll found that 18% of GOP respondents supported Osborn over Fischer, closely mirroring an independent poll last month that suggested 17% of GOP voters surveyed planned to vote for Osborn. However, an August poll showed Fischer with a 1-point lead over Osborn.

Nearly half of respondents to the August poll hadn’t heard of Osborn enough to have an opinion about him.

But in last week’s poll – taken after the “Democrat Dan” attack ad swept the state – 24% of respondents said they were unsure of their opinion of Osborn, indicating that his name recognition has increased as Nebraska approaches the election scheduled for November 5.

Vince Powers, former chairman of the Nebraska Democratic Party, said Fischer’s supporters “helped Dan Osborn tremendously yesterday” by running attack ads that “gave Osborn the ID he was missing in the campaign.”

“Everyone now knows that Osborn is running against a terrified Fischer whose only achievement is breaking her promise to only serve two terms,” ​​Powers said in a social media post last week.

Meanwhile, Perre Neilan, a political consultant and former Nebraska GOP director, said that while Osborn is “taking advantage of the frustration” many Nebraskans feel with both political parties – and benefiting from national donors willing to take a chance on his candidacy – voters The Republican Party’s “I’ll be coming home” at the end.

“I’m still confident in Deb Fischer’s re-election,” he said.

Fischer won more votes in the Nebraska statewide primary in May than any other candidate, outperforming both former President Donald Trump and Nebraska’s junior U.S. senator, Pete Ricketts. Osborn, who had to file a petition to get on the November ballot as a third-party candidate, did not make the first round of voting.

In a statement, a spokesman for Osborn’s campaign said Osborn “built a movement of support in Nebraska while Senator Fischer acted as if she did not want to participate in the campaign.”

The spokesperson noted that Fischer, who declined to debate Osborn this election cycle, has not held public campaign events this year and has not participated in a town hall since 2017.

“Now that the race is gaining increasing attention, it makes sense that Senator Fischer would resort to unfair slander on television,” the spokesman said. “But Nebraskans aren’t falling for it: A survey conducted while Fischer’s fake attack ads were hitting the airwaves showed Dan’s best numbers yet.”

A spokesman for the Fischer campaign, which has largely dismissed recent polls showing the race is close, said it avoids “staged political events” and has instead “always met with Nebraskans to help solve their problems – just in August more than 100 stops in cities in every part of the state.”

In her statement last week, Fischer said that “there is nothing independent about the Dan Osborn case.”

“He is funded by billionaire Democrats, supports Social Security for illegal immigrants and loves Bernie Sanders,” she said. “We are confident that as Nebraskans learn more about who Dan Osborn is and what he stands for, they will know that he is not the right fit for Nebraska.”

The conservative news site The Washington Examiner shared reporting on Fischer’s campaign linking Osborn to Sanders, an independent U.S. senator from Vermont who describes himself as a democratic socialist.

Osborn’s spokesman called attempts to link him to Sanders “unfair” and said Osborn’s warm comments about Sanders came in the context of the Vermont senator’s support for the 77-day strike Osborn helped lead at Kellogg’s in 2021, which he also received support from Ricketts, then governor of Nebraska.

Osborn’s campaign was boosted by ad buys funded by two super PACs: Nebraska Railroaders for Public Safety and Retire Career Politicians PAC, which collectively spent more than $1.6 million supporting Osborn or attacking Fischer.

Both PACs are funded by progressive donors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a D.C.-based nonprofit that conservatives call a “democratic dark money group.”

In addition to Heartland Resurgence, a Missouri-based PAC financing attack ads against Osborn, Fischer’s campaign has funded most of its own ad campaigns.

From January 2023 to June 2024, Fischer’s campaign raised more than $4 million and had nearly $3 million on hand by the end of June, according to Federal Election Commission documents and campaign spending tracker OpenSecrets.

Osborn raised $1.64 million and had about $650,000 on hand.