Nebraska's Full Slate: Governor, Senate and Four Ballot Measures
Tuesday's Nebraska ballot is the state's biggest package in years — the governor's office, a U.S. Senate seat, all three House seats, and four statewide measures voters should read before the booth.
Nebraska voters face a complete state reset on Tuesday: the governor's office, a U.S. Senate seat, all three of the state's U.S. House seats, and four statewide ballot measures appear on the same ballot — the kind of election that sets Nebraska's direction for a decade.
The governor's race leads: Nebraskans elect their chief executive in midterm years, and the office controls the state's budget proposal, its agencies, and the bully pulpit of a state whose politics have been reliably Republican in statewide races for a generation — with a nonpartisan Legislature that answers to no party's whip.
The U.S. Senate contest runs on a parallel track, with Nebraska's senators serving six-year national terms from a state whose Senate elections have tracked its presidential vote closely in recent cycles.
The four ballot measures deserve the voter's closest reading, because measures outlast candidates. Nebraska's ballot questions this cycle — spanning the tax, governance and social questions the initiative and referendum process brings to Nebraska ballots — are summarized, with full texts, in the Secretary of State's official voter guides and the state's newspapers of record. Nebraska's constitution makes the petition process a genuine fourth branch of lawmaking, and 2026's measures are this cycle's installment.
Below the statewide lines, voters decide the nonpartisan Unicameral's open seats, University of Nebraska regents, the State Board of Education, judicial retention — where judges stand for yes-or-no retention votes, a Nebraska tradition that puts the courts on the ballot without campaigns — and county and local offices.
Polls run 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Central. Nebraska's county-based counting reports through the night, and the state's reputation for clean, competently run elections is one of the few things on the ballot nobody is contesting.
