This is an appreciation, not an obituary; former Republican senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska is still with us. But two days before Christmas, the 53-year-old Sasse announced online, with classic Midwestern directness, “I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.”
Sometimes the best of us get dealt the worst of it. In July 2024, Sasse stepped down from his position as president of the University of Florida, to help care for his wife, Melissa, who had suffered multiple strokes and a brain aneurysm in the past, after she was diagnosed with epilepsy.
A fifth-generation Nebraskan, Sasse grew up in Fremont, a county seat with about 27,000 people, where he was his high school’s valedictorian. He went to Harvard University, once joking that he chose the Ivy League school “not because of superior academics, but because of inferior athletics.”
ESPN analyst Mel Kiper Jr. speaks of certain players having a “constant motor.” Sasse’s pre-Senate life was a fast-moving blur of accomplishments: a master’s degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis and a PhD in history from Yale; stints of business consulting; chief of staff to then-Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska in 2005; teaching at the University of Texas at Austin; two years as an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and becoming president of Midland University in Fremont in 2010 at the ripe old age of 37.
In February 2013, Nebraska GOP Sen. Mike Johanns unexpectedly announced he would not seek reelection the following year, and when Gov. Dave Heineman declined a run as well, it left a wide-open race in the deep-red state. To say Sasse was an unknown when he started is an understatement. After an early poll found his name recognition at just 3 percent, his staffers told all their relatives to answer the phone if a stranger calls, just in case it was a pollster.
Sasse’s first efforts as a campaigner didn’t always run smoothly; in 2017, he recalled, “I’ve never run for anything until I did this, and I used to feel really free to just say whatever I thought, even when I thought it was witty, regardless if it would get me in trouble. And I used to joke that we have 93 counties in Nebraska, and 12 of them have people. It turns out people from the other 81 counties don’t like that kind of joke.”
But Sasse quickly found his rhythm on the campaign trail, talking to his constituents as if they were grown-ups. He was not populist in the sense that he was a rabble-rouser or prone to histrionics. But he was populist in his sense that he emphasized how a distant, out-of-touch federal government in Washington made decisions without listening to those most affected by them.
At some campaign events, Sasse would stand beside a stack of 20,000 sheets of paper, more than eight feet tall (a concealed pipe held it together), representing the number of pages of regulations associated with Obamacare. “This is a picture of what government can’t do well, wasn’t built to do, and inevitably fails at,” Sasse told Nebraskans. He ended up visiting all those 93 counties and out-hustled the rest of the five-person field. Sasse called himself a “constructive conservative.”
As a senator, Sasse clearly relished his work — particularly on the Senate Intelligence Committee — but also remained a devoted father to his three children, multitasking whenever possible, including helping his son with homework behind the committee dais. His arrival in the Senate immediately preceded Donald Trump’s emergence in the GOP, and Sasse never altered his bluntly negative assessment of Trump, refusing to endorse him in 2016 and 2020.
During this service in the Senate, Sasse voted with the Trump administration when he agreed with it, on tax cuts, and all three of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. He staunchly supported the filibuster, understanding that no GOP Senate majority was eternal.
After the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot by Trump supporters, Sasse was one of seven Republicans who voted to convict the president at his impeachment trial. The Nebraska Republican Party Central Committee responded by passing a resolution declaring its “deep disappointment and sadness” with Sasse’s service.
Sasse said in a video message to the central committee afterward, “I listen to Nebraskans every day, and very few of them are as angry about life as some of the people on this committee. Not all of you, but a lot. Political addicts don’t represent most Nebraska conservatives. … Politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude.”
Despite Sasse’s opposition to Trump, in 2020 he won reelection with more than 62 percent of the vote; he outperformed Trump by almost 27,000 votes. A campaign staffer marveled not just at Sasse’s seemingly relentless energy, but as his ability to campaign while consistently eating burritos that had been unrefrigerated for two days in the campaign RV. In keeping with the gallows humor that Sasse and those around him have maintained since his cancer diagnosis, the former staffer said the news was shocking because he figured salmonella would have gotten him first.
As the American political scene spun off its axis in recent years, Sasse seemed like a man too sane for his time. Thoughtful and immersed in the details of policy, he recognized the limits of the federal government’s ability to solve problems — but also wanted the government to perform its essential duties as well as it could.
He had warned in a pre-election interview in 2014, “Politics can’t fix our culture, but politics can lie to us long enough to keep us from focusing on the cultural issues in our own lives.” He left the Senate in January 2023, two years into his second term. The following month, he became president of the University of Florida.
Given that Sasse is still in his 50s, conservatives who long for a post-Trump GOP restoration of sanity might have held out hope that this decent, thoughtful, industrious man would return to politics. Lord knows, we could use more like him. We could bewail the unjustness of the fact that our time with Sasse proving so limited. But we should also be thankful that we got as much time with him in public life as we did.
True to form, on Christmas Eve, Sasse reposted on X a GIF from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”: “I am not dead yet!”
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