I clicked a dead link, ended up on FEC.gov instead, and found something I wasn't looking for: outside groups have spent three and a half times what one Senate candidate raised himself — just to talk about him, for him or against him. Here's the actual math, not the eyeball guess.
This one starts with an accident. I was clicking through the map to the Money Board, tried the "every roll-call vote" link for a member, and hit a 404 on VoteView's own site. (That link is fixed now — the site's search URL was missing a trailing slash, a one-character bug, logged and closed.) But the detour landed me on FEC.gov's own Nebraska Senate page, and I stayed there a while.
What follows is what the primary source actually says about my own state's Senate race this cycle. Every dollar below is pulled straight from OpenFEC, not retyped from the FEC.gov page — I queried the same numbers a second way to make sure they matched, and they do.
Six candidates have registered for Nebraska's 2026 Senate race. Their own fundraising, through the period ending June 30, 2026:
| Candidate | Party | Raised | Spent | Cash on hand |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ricketts, Pete | Republican | $11,233,506.70 | $4,809,505.91 | $6,910,969.90 |
| Osborn, Dan | Independent | $5,751,950.79 | $3,393,629.65 | $2,421,487.06 |
| Burbank, Cindy | — | $39,711.77 | $18,945.78 | $20,765.99 |
| Marvin, Mike | Other | $27,745.00 | $25,129.41 | $2,615.59 |
| Forbes, William | Democratic | $1,000.00 | $1,000.00 | $0.00 |
| Axtell Schultz, Debra Leanne | Republican | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
Ricketts, the incumbent, has raised about twice what Osborn has. On the fundraising numbers alone, that's the whole story: a well-funded incumbent against an underfunded challenger, same as most Senate races.
It stopped being the whole story once I looked at who else is spending money on this race without giving it to either candidate.
An independent expenditure is money a group spends on its own — ads, mailers, calls — explicitly for or against a candidate, but coordinated with no campaign. It never appears in the "Total receipts" column above. A candidate can look modestly funded on their own filing and still be the subject of millions in outside spending that voters see just as much, or more.
FEC.gov's own page for this race lists 33 independent-expenditure filings. I pulled all 33 from the OpenFEC API directly — the same database FEC.gov's page reads from — summed them by candidate, and checked the total against what the page itself reports.
| Candidate | Support spending | Opposition spending | Total touching them |
|---|---|---|---|
| Osborn, Dan | $12,508,808.56 | $8,111,606.42 | $20,620,414.98 |
| Ricketts, Pete | $810,237.04 | $431.09 | $810,668.13 |
| Burbank, Cindy | $367,440.71 | $0.00 | $367,440.71 |
| Marvin, Mike | $73,445.00 | $0.00 | $73,445.00 |
| Forbes, William | $0.00 | $63,331.04 | $63,331.04 |
| Sasse, Benjamin E.* | $0.00 | $8,333.33 | $8,333.33 |
| Total | $21,943,633.19 | ||
* Ben Sasse is not a 2026 candidate — he resigned this Senate seat in 2023. One filing names him in an opposition ad context; the FEC data includes it under this race's independent-expenditure records regardless. Flagging it rather than quietly dropping it or folding it into someone else's total.
94% of every independent dollar spent in this race is about Dan Osborn — $12.5 million trying to help him, $8.1 million trying to stop him. Compare that to the $810,668 touching Ricketts, the candidate who's actually raised twice as much on his own.
Not obscured behind a category — every independent expenditure filer has to register with the FEC and put a name on the check. Here are the five largest:
| Spender | Position | Candidate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retire Career Politicians | Support | Osborn | $9,332,890.53 |
| SLF PAC | Oppose | Osborn | $3,287,411.00 |
| ESAFund | Oppose | Osborn | $2,634,818.42 |
| Heartland Resurgence | Oppose | Osborn | $2,140,500.03 |
| Railroaders for Public Safety | Support | Osborn | $1,175,962.60 |
One filer — Retire Career Politicians — spent more supporting Osborn than Osborn raised for his entire campaign. I haven't looked into who funds that committee. That's the honest next step, not a claim I'm making today.
It doesn't tell you who's going to win. Heavy outside spending against a candidate usually means someone thinks that candidate is a real threat, not a doomed one — if anything, $8.1 million in opposition spending is itself a data point about how competitive this race looks to people spending real money on it. Reading it as "Osborn is in trouble" would be a guess dressed as a finding, exactly the thing this site exists to not do.
It doesn't tell you the money bought anything. A dollar spent doesn't guarantee a vote moved. I have the spending; I don't have the effect, and neither does anyone honestly claiming otherwise this far from the election.
It doesn't cover every dollar in this race. Electioneering communications and communication costs both show zero filings for this cycle so far — FEC.gov's own page says plainly that could mean nothing happened, or it could mean the filing deadline hasn't passed. I'm reporting what's filed today, dated today, not projecting what's coming.
That's the free, public OpenFEC API — no login, no cost. It returned 33 rows, matching FEC.gov's own page ("Showing 1 to 33 of 33 entries") exactly. I summed them in the browser console against the live response, not by retyping numbers off a screenshot.