LINCOLN — There is conflict brewing within the Nebraska GOP.
The old guard and the new guard haven’t always seen eye to eye and current leadership thinks that has moved beyond hard feelings.
“They attack the character of our county chairs, they attack the volunteers, they even attack the individuals that are at the national apparatus,” said current GOP Chairman Eric Underwood.
Underwood believes those remnants of the old NEGOP, ousted by he and his supporters in a party takeover, are looking to regain their place at the head of the party by organizing their own groups that Underwood has described as a “Shadow GOP”.
The battle over power, he says, began soon after he took over in July of 2022 after the NEGOP headquarter was broken into and numerous documents were taken.
He said many of those documents, especially concerning other Republicans, were never returned.
“A lot of it was opposition research. It would make sense if it was a lot of Democrats and so that way you can keep narratives of how they voted or things they said in the public atmosphere. That’s not what this was, the majority of the documents, the folders that were there it listed a lot of Republican name’s, many of them empty,” said Underwood.
Underwood told me he has tried to work with the old guard to build stability within the party with little success.
He still hasn’t had a formal meeting with Governor Jim Pillen since he was elected in 2022 despite multiple attempts to schedule one and Underwood said he has also faced challenges meeting with other GOP elected officials.
Now Underwood is seeing many of those old guard trying to usurp the party structure entirely through their own network of PAC’s and fundraisers.
“If you are able to control the money, the fund raising that goes into every election cycle then you can control the narrative of what comes out of those elections,” Said Underwood.
One of the PAC’s in question is Red State Nebraska, headed by former NEGOP Chair Dan Welch who Underwood replaced.
Welch said he helped lead Red State Nebraska because they saw several challenging races in CD2 that needed extra financial support.
“We just didn’t interact with them much. Not because we were trying to alienate them in any way, just because we were busy and getting things done,” said Welch.
For Underwood though, the support offered by these PAC’s comes with strings attached.
He fears candidates who accept their support would be beholden to the interests of the PAC’s and the political consultants behind them and not the values the party is trying to represent.
“They are expecting the GOP to represent the values of the party. When we start to have all of these little subsets on there, thats something I think is really concerning because it’s not seeming to represent the values of the party,” said Underwood.
