Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, a Republican, holds a six-point lead over Dan Osborn, the independent seeking to unseat him, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena University.
Many Democrats have been supporting Mr. Osborn’s bid, believing that an independent has a better chance of flipping a Republican Senate seat in Nebraska than a Democrat. But the poll found that most voters there appear to view Mr. Osborn as a Democrat in disguise.
The race is seen as a test of how independents may fare in an environment where both parties’ brands have become politically toxic.
More than half of voters — 55 percent — say they see Mr. Osborn, a union leader, as more of a Democrat than anything else. Just one third of voters say they consider him to be an independent.
That perception is a challenge in a state that Mr. Trump won two years ago by more than 20 percentage points, and where views of the Democratic Party are particularly grim. Just over one quarter of voters say that they are satisfied with the Democratic Party, compared with 45 percent who say they are satisfied with Republicans. The poll found close to half of voters in Nebraska approve of the president’s job performance, which is above the national average of 37 percent.
Even independent voters are skeptical that a truly independent candidate is on the ballot. Forty-three percent say Mr. Osborn is more of an independent, while 42 percent see him as more of a Democrat. The only group that saw him as more independent was Democrats.
Many Democrats were eager to support Mr. Osborn, seeing an independent as their best hope for unseating a Republican in a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate in two decades. Cindy Burbank, who became the Democratic nominee for Senate, withdrew from the race in July to clear a path for Mr. Osborn, as she pledged to do during the primary.
Mr. Osborn and Mr. Ricketts each ran for the Senate two years ago, but in separate races. Mr. Osborn challenged Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican, and lost by roughly six percentage points. Mr. Ricketts ran in a special election to retain the seat he was appointed to when former Senator Ben Sasse, a vocal critic of Mr. Trump, resigned.
That year, Mr. Ricketts, a reliable Republican vote in the Senate, won by double digits. This cycle, the poll finds Mr. Ricketts up by a much narrower margin.
His race is far tighter than the battle for the governorship, where Governor Jim Pillen, a Republican, is ahead by 14 percentage points in his bid for re-election.
And while there is little publicly available polling of the Senate race, and much of it is aligned with one of the campaigns, if the Times/Siena poll underestimated Mr. Osborn’s support by even a few percentage points, it could put him in striking distance.
The poll found Mr. Ricketts ahead with traditionally Republican-leaning groups such as older voters, white working-class voters and men.
Mr. Osborn, for his part, has consolidated more than 90 percent of support among Democrats and is leading among independent voters by close to 30 points.
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