Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert, a Republican seeking reelection in one of her party’s few big-city strongholds, was supposed to be unbeatable. She had won her 2021 reelection bid for a third term with almost two-thirds of the vote, and her 2025 campaign coffers were full of money from corporate CEOs and billionaire donors. But Stothert knew she was running in a year when President Donald Trump’s extremism and billionaire “special government employee” Elon Musk’s destructive impulses had done serious damage to the GOP brand. Faced with evidence that Democrats in Nebraska’s largest city and across the country are highly motivated to vote in 2025’s odd-year elections, and with signals that the local campaign of Democratic mayoral candidate John W. Ewing Jr. was surging, Stothert and her supporters seized on what GOP strategists keep imagining to be a winning strategy: transphobia.

With a campaign based on what Nebraska state Senator Megan Hunt described as “trans hate and discrimination,” Stothert’s backers delivered “a last-minute blitz of Republican anti-transgender propaganda.” A final TV ad from the mayor’s camp claimed, “Ewing stands with radicals who want to allow boys in girls’ sports,” while a mailing from a pro-Stothert political action committee recycled national GOP talking points and suggested that Ewing wants to “transition minors without their parents’ consent.”

But guess what? The GOP strategy failed. Massively. In what was broadly described as a major upset—one that Democrats were hailing as a hopeful sign that they can make progress in red states as frustration mounts with Trump and Musk—Ewing scored a sweeping 56-44 victory over the incumbent. He will now become Omaha’s first Black mayor.

Ewing’s decisive victory sent a powerful signal about the emerging politics of 2025—and the limitations of the GOP’s bigoted tactics. “We need to understand this as a victory against trans hate and discrimination,” declared Senator Hunt, who has led the fight against anti-trans measures in the Nebraska legislature. “Regular Americans don’t react to or receive the call to trans panic. Enough. We are speaking to the future.”

The result from Omaha, a heartland city where Republicans have historically been able to hold their own politically, counters the narrative of GOP strategists who continue to build their campaigns around crude anti-trans messaging.

TV ads and mailings like those that targeted Ewing were used by Republicans and their conservative allies in races across the country in 2024, and have become standard lines of attack on progressives running in the partisan and technically nonpartisan contests (such as the Omaha race) of 2025. But Stothert leaned especially heavily on them as issues relevant to the municipal contest, saying, “The mayor is absolutely 100% involved with public bathrooms in our public spaces, community centers, golf courses, parks, and day camps.”

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Ewing, a retired deputy police chief, the associate minister of the city’s Salem Baptist Church, and the elected treasurer of surrounding Douglas County, countered Stothert’s focus on the issue by saying, “Nobody’s ever brought that question up. So I believe it’s a made-up issue by Jean Stothert and the Republican Party.”

But Ewing and his supporters did not simply call out the incumbent’s election-season scheming. The Democrat actively campaigned for the support of LGBTQ+ voters, appearing this month at an event sponsored by Nebraska Stonewall Democrats at the city’s FLIXX Lounge & Cabaret Show Bar. And the dynamic Nebraska Democratic Party, which is chaired by Jane Kleeb, an ally of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who was recently elected as president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, directly and effectively countered the attacks on Ewing, “While Mayor Stothert continues to use the same tired Republican playbook to distract voters with cultural wars like focusing on bathrooms,” noted a statement from party executive director Precious McKesson, “John Ewing continues to focus on real issues that impact people’s pockets—the endless potholes, new economic development, and housing that will help Omahans, not Jean’s big donors.”

The Democratic message was reinforced on social media with a waggish image of the mayor peeking under the door of a bathroom stall, which featured the tagline, “Jean is focused on potties. John is focused on fixing potholes.”

The contrast proved a powerful one. Ewing won big in a city that is at the heart of a congressional district narrowly held by Republican US Representative Don Bacon. Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin noted after the Omaha results were announced, “From coast to coast, from blue to purple to even red states, Democrats are overwhelmingly outperforming Republicans in nearly every election held this year” and declared, “After tonight, vulnerable House Republicans like Don Bacon are on notice.”

All true. Also true was Kleeb’s observation that a big-spending anti-trans campaign from a prominent Republican and her allies was successfully countered by “the creative graphic and simple message [Nebraska Democrats] used to drive the point home that Dems are focused on issues families care about and that the GOP is out of touch.”