In the Nebraska marijuana party’s Senate primary, ‘a daring plan’ angers loyalists

Tucked away on a primary ballot that most Nebraskans will not glimpse this week, in the grassroots race for the state’s smallest political party’s nomination for the United States Senate, something is unfolding.

It has been called “a daring plan” by some and “nefarious” by others.

It has attracted little attention but tens of thousands of campaign finance dollars.

It has pitted Legal Marijuana NOW Party devotees against political opportunists, with both sides believing in the purity of their own cause, and with both sides casting their rivals as unserious.

In one camp, there is Kenneth Peterson, a 43-year-old Beatrice man who registered with the Legal Marijuana NOW Party when it gained formal recognition in 2021 and who filed to run for his party’s Senate nomination in February.

Then there is his opponent, Kerry Eddy, a Lincoln woman and Nebraska Air National Guard veteran who joined the party and filed to seek its Senate nomination in March, the result of a plan to defeat Peterson in the May 14 primary in an effort not to represent Nebraska in Washington herself, but to ensure someone else does.

“I am running to support an independent candidate — Dan Osborn,” Eddy wrote on her campaign website, where she outlined her plan to help unseat Republican Sen. Deb Fischer by winning the Legal Marijuana NOW nomination before, apparently, dropping out of the race ahead of November’s general election and pushing would-be Eddy voters to support Osborn, a former union leader and the independent candidate challenging Fischer, a two-term incumbent.

Eddy’s unorthodox and little-known candidacy has garnered support from a Super PAC that is also backing Osborn’s campaign, and her run seems to have brought modest voter registration gains to the Legal Marijuana NOW party, which she said she hopes to help “legitimize” by drawing voters this May.

But her bid for Senate — if it is a bid for office at all — came as an unwelcome surprise to the party’s core, including Peterson and Mark Elworth Jr., the party’s chair, who has cast Eddy’s candidacy as dishonest “shenanigans” undermining the integrity of both the primary and general elections.

Those clashing views of the same candidacy mark the battle lines that have been drawn in a primary race that, Elworth said, “might come down to 10 votes.”

“It’s a small matter, really,” he said. “But it’s a big matter, too.”

A native Nebraskan and artist and musician who is pursuing a master’s in drawing and painting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Eddy, 53, is an unlikely candidate for federal office, particularly in this state — a fact she is aware of.

“Being a very liberal person living in a very, very red state is, um, uncomfortable,” she said, laughing. “But Nebraska is my home. This is where I am. I have amazing friends here and I have family here. And I think we could do better.”

That belief is, in part, what led her into the Senate race where she finds herself now.

Eddy, who was a registered Democrat prior to March, can’t recall another Senate race in Nebraska in which her former party hadn’t run a candidate. But along came this one, and along came Osborn, who led Fischer by 2 points in a November poll conducted by a liberal research firm — enough to inspire hope in a state that hasn’t elected a non-Republican to the Senate since 2006.

But then came Peterson, who seemed to pose a threat to Osborn’s electability to Eddy and her circle of hyper-political friends.

“We all kind of figured out that it could come down to like 8,000, 10,000 votes or something,” Eddy recalled. “And if it got to that point, where maybe there was a bunch of voters who were gonna vote Legal Marijuana — that 8,000 or 10,000 or whatever — that would make the difference.”

In a post for the leftist politics blog Seeing Red Nebraska, Julia Schleck, a friend of Eddy’s who convinced her to challenge Peterson, offered the same calculus that Eddy had, suggesting the candidacy of “some luddite weed-bro” could spoil Osborn’s bid to unseat Fischer in November.

“This state of affairs called for a daring plan,” Schleck wrote. “What if we could find someone to run against this dude in the primary and show him how to get s*** done in politics? If they could sweep the primary and then take their name off the ballot and endorse Osborn, throwing their votes his way, we could actually have a pro-legalization senator in Nebraska come November, and one that would support unions and workers too.”

That someone, Schleck told readers, was Eddy, who filed to run against Peterson on March 1, the last day candidates in Nebraska could submit the requisite paperwork to run for office.

But in an interview, Eddy was less direct about her ultimate objective than Schleck had been in the blog post — and less direct than Eddy had been on own her campaign website, where she had made clear that her “intent is to bring Legal Marijuana NOW voters to Dan Osborn.” 

“I definitely would be running for Senate — you bet I will,” she told the Journal Star last month. “The point of this is after the primary and as the campaigns get rolling, we’ll be reevaluating, you know, ‘How is the campaign going? What kind of momentum do we have? What kind of support do I have? Is this feasible to continue and run all the way?’ Which would be amazing and I would be 100% all-in.”

She did not rule out withdrawing from the race before the general election should she win the primary, but Eddy did not commit to doing so either. She said she would support Osborn “if it looks like he has a better chance of keeping Deb Fischer from going back to the Senate.”

“And if the tables turned, and I was the one with all the support, and it looked like I was gaining momentum, I would hope that he would do the same,” she said. “But I can’t speak for him.”

In an email, a spokesman for Osborn — who, as an independent, must gather signatures to crack the November ballot and won’t compete in a primary — said his campaign “is not supporting Kerry Eddy or any other candidates for the U.S. Senate seat held by Deb Fischer.”

Fischer’s campaign declined to comment.

At the core of Eddy’s run for Senate is the desire to unseat Fischer, a hope she is direct about, both offline and on her campaign website, where the message “F*** Fischer,” she wrote, “goes without saying.”

On this front, Eddy is aligned with the Legal Marijuana NOW Party operatives who she is otherwise at odds with.

“I don’t care for Deb Fischer myself,” said Peterson. “I’m her opponent. If she had the same ideas as we did, we wouldn’t be running against her.”

Peterson, 43, joined the race after Elworth, who Peterson has been a political disciple of for a decade, asked him to seek the party’s nomination for Fischer’s seat — a decision the party made only after it became clear that the Nebraska Democratic Party would not field a candidate.

“We didn’t want to step on any Democrat toes,” Elworth said, adding: “We weren’t thinking we were stepping on anybody’s toes.”

But soon after Peterson filed for the seat, it became clear that they had thought wrong.

Elworth said he was collecting signatures in North Platte for the petition drive to legalize medical cannabis when he was approached by a set of Osborn supporters who urged Elworth to urge Peterson to withdraw from the race.

The Osborn affiliates showed Elworth the poll that indicated the independent could beat Fischer by 2% — a margin that Peterson’s presence on the general election ballot could erase.

Then came the knocks on Peterson’s door in Beatrice, where he lives in a tiny house with a big garden, he says proudly; the humble home base of his word-of-mouth campaign for Senate.

Less than a week after Peterson submitted the paperwork to run for office, he said, a man showed up at his doorstep.

“He was kind of pretending like he was for legalization at first,” Peterson said. “And then I talked to him more, and he kind of hinted at — Dan Osborn wants me to drop out. He didn’t use those exact words, but he kind of hinted at (it).”

The man has returned to his doorstep two more times in the months since his initial visit, said Peterson, who has not withdrawn from the race and doesn’t plan to.

A spokesman for Osborn’s campaign said they are “aware of Osborn supporters who tried to encourage Mr. Peterson not to run,” but maintained that none of them were paid campaign staffers.

Osborn’s campaign spokesman also said the campaign hadn’t recruited Eddy to challenge Peterson in the Legal Marijuana NOW primary, but said Osborn does have “multiple, passionate supporters who want to see a united movement for legal cannabis and are supporting Eddy in the primary.”

Both candidates vying to represent the Legal Marijuana NOW Party on November’s ballot come from little means.

Eddy, who battled thyroid and breast cancer in 2020, said she “will be paying medical debt for the rest of (her) life.” Peterson, meanwhile, suggested he is “probably the poorest Senatorial candidate probably in the country. Probably.”

They both cast their campaigns as grassroots efforts — a stark contrast from Fischer and Sen. Pete Ricketts, the incumbents who each raised more than $1.8 million last year, dwarfing the war chests of their opponents in a state that almost exclusively backs Republicans in statewide races.

Peterson has not raised or spent the $5,000 that would require him to file a campaign finance disclosure form with the Federal Election Commission.

Eddy has, drawing more than $16,000 in campaign donations, at least $14,700 of which has come from a group of four out-of-state donors, according to her latest campaign finance filing.

Eddy’s campaign has spent less than $1,000, according to the filings, which indicate her only campaign expenditure thus far was to pay the treasurer who handled her FEC filings.

But her run for Senate has been boosted by Nebraska Railroaders For Public Safety, a Super PAC that registered with the FEC in October and has since raised more than $110,000, much of which came from two donors: the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a D.C.-based nonprofit known to fund progressive causes, and Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder who lives in Washington state.

Hoffman and the nonprofit donated $50,000 each to the PAC, which spent $31,658 on political mailers and digital advertising in support of Eddy’s run for Senate, according to the group’s FEC filings.

The PAC has spent money in support of only one other candidate for federal office: Dan Osborn. The group spent $15,000 in November on a mailer in support of his candidacy.

“The only downside is he’s from Omaha,” said Michael Helmink, a Hemingford man and longtime railroad worker who is the treasurer of the PAC supporting Eddy’s run for Senate.

Helmink, who said he formed relationships with out-of-state progressive donors when he formed an exploratory committee last year mulling his own bid for the Senate seat that Osborn and company are running for, is unequivocal: supporting Osborn is “a no-brainer.”

But Helmink maintains that the PAC is not pouring money into the Legal Marijuana NOW primary race simply as a means to support Osborn, the PAC’s favored candidate who has garnered less than half as much financial support from the PAC as Eddy has.

“Dan doesn’t show up on a primary (ballot), right?” Helmink said in a phone interview this month as he drove to his home in western Nebraska’s Box Butte County.

“So there’s really not a whole lot of support at this time that I think is well spent. (Eddy) will be on the primary, and I also think that her beliefs align very well with Dan and ours as a committee. Civil rights, legalization, union friendly — that’s the kind of candidates that we like to support.”

Historically, he said, that has left labor groups in Nebraska funding the campaigns of Democrats “just so they can go out and lose by 70 points.”

“We need to find a different strategy to get any kind of a voice in this state,” he said.

Still, Helmink did not cast his PAC’s support of Eddy as part of a new strategy. He said he had read online that she supports Osborn, but insisted the PAC’s support of her candidacy is not dependent on that.

If Eddy wins her primary and does not withdraw, though, the PAC will have elevated a candidate who would then square off with Osborn — a perplexing political calculus that could create the spoiler scenario that Eddy has warned of.

“So we’re splitting the vote on a legitimate cause,” Helmink said. “I believe (Peterson) is not legitimate. And for a long time I’ve felt like the Legal NOW party was just a way to siphon off those votes. I just — I think that Dan is the stronger candidate. That’s what I think happens if Ms. Eddy makes it through, so, I don’t know. That’s my thought process behind that.”

If the plot to unseat Fischer is at the core of Eddy’s campaign, at its edges are mixed feelings about the party she joined to seek its Senate nomination.

In Schleck’s blog, in Helmink’s comments and in Eddy’s own remarks, there is a tone of condescension toward the Legal Marijuana NOW Party’s chair and handpicked Senate candidate, who Eddy called “a weed bro” who “doesn’t seem to have much in the way of a platform other than, like, ‘legalize marijuana.'”

She sees her candidacy as “further legitimizing the party and giving it a voice that isn’t your everyday, ‘I’m gonna go home and smoke a bowl,'” she said.

Indeed, much of Peterson’s campaign platform amounts to fully legalizing marijuana “without restrictions,” he said, including taxes — a tough sell in any political arena, much less the U.S. Senate.

But neither Elworth nor Peterson see their party — which had 6,684 registered voters as of May 1, up 600 from Feb. 1 — as in need of legitimization, despite the fact that the party hasn’t yet fielded a candidate that has won a general election.

L. Leroy Lopez, the party’s nominee for State Auditor last year, finished second in a three-man race, though his campaign platform mirrored that of a constitutionalist; in his responses to candidate questionnaires, he did not mention cannabis.

For the Legal Marijuana NOW Party to maintain its status as a recognized political party, one of its candidates must poll at least 5% in a statewide race, a hurdle that Eddy hopes she can help the party clear in this month’s primary.

Elworth and Peterson, though, view Eddy’s candidacy through less rosy lenses. They call it — and her — “dishonest.” Elworth believes Eddy’s campaign tactics provide grounds for a lawsuit that he does not plan to file.

In the same way that Schleck and Helmink and Eddy see Peterson’s candidacy as unserious, he and Elworth believe Eddy’s bid for their party’s nomination is insincere — and, like Peterson’s own run for Senate, likely inconsequential.

“(Osborn) has every right to run, and so does Kerry Eddy if she were seriously trying to win in November and not trying to get me off the ballot,” Peterson said, later adding: “I could drop out now and Dan Osborn will still lose, most likely. He most likely will lose to Deb Fischer, even if it’s a two-way race.”

But it won’t be a two-way race, the so-called weed bros insist.

Even if Peterson loses, even if Eddy declines the party’s nomination, Nebraska law would allow the party more than a month to fill her vacancy on the November ballot, either through a mass convention or via the party’s executive committee, according to the Secretary of State’s Office, which Elworth has been in frequent contact with this spring.

“I’m not worried about much,” Elworth said. “I love Ken, but if (Eddy) wins, she’s gonna drop out. She has to drop out by the first of August and we have until Sept. 3 to put somebody on the ballot.

“And I plan to run and take Dan down at that point. So I don’t know what her point is.”