Voters in Omaha, Nebraska, decisively elected county treasurer John Ewing, Jr., a Democrat, to be the city’s next mayor on Tuesday — despite a last-minute blitz of Republican anti-transgender propaganda.
Incumbent Mayor Jean Stothert conceded to Ewing on Tuesday night in a historic upset, Omaha news station WOWT reported. Mayor-elect Ewing, who received more than 56% of the vote to Stothert’s 43%, is the first Black candidate elected to the mayor’s office in Omaha history, and will take the oath of office in June.

Stothert was generally favored going into Election Day, as a 12-year incumbent who won her last election with a whopping 64% of the vote. But in the final weeks of the campaign, Stothert and a conservative PAC blitzed Ewing and the Democrats with anti-trans ads similar to those seen in the 2024 presidential election.
One TV ad from the Stothert campaign claimed that Ewing “stands with radicals” in favor of “boys in girls’ bathrooms and sports,” according to the Omaha World-Herald. Separately, a mailer paid for by the newly-formed PAC Omaha Leadership Fund — itself funded by another right-wing, anti-abortion PAC called “Common Sense Nebraska” — claimed that Ewing wants to “transition minors without their parents’ consent” and is “backed by radicals who will allow men in girls’ sports and bathrooms,” as seen in what appears to be a photo of the mailer posted to the r/Omaha subreddit last week.
Ewing’s campaign called Stothert’s claims “utterly false” and demanded that the TV ad be pulled, per the World-Herald. In a statement to the newspaper, Stothert said she had no knowledge of the mailer before it was released, but stood by the TV ad. The claims in that ad were not connected to any statements by Ewing himself, she said, but were instead based on his endorsements from the Nebraska Democratic Party and the Nebraska Stonewall Democrats, the party’s LGBTQ+ caucus. Stonewall Dems oppose LB89, a Republican bill in the state legislature that would ban trans students from using bathrooms or locker rooms, or competing on sports teams, that match their gender; legislators voted to advance the bill last month, after a similar version died as the result of a filibuster in 2024.

( This was brilliant!!)
But though Ewing and the Nebraska Dems pushed back against the Stothert camp’s accusations, they also did not distance themselves from trans people, as other Democratic candidates like Colin Allred did in 2024. On May 2, Ewing held a Q&A at Omaha gay bar Flixx hosted by local drag queen Jackie Oh Kennedy. And only a few days before the election, the Nebraska Dems posted an image to X declaring that “Jean is focused on potties,” featuring an edited image of Stothert’s face poking underneath a bathroom stall. (“Ultimately, Jean would rather focus on potties, while John focuses on fixing potholes,” Nebraska Democratic Party Executive Director Precious McKesson wrote in a May 8 press release.)
Democrats and LGBTQ+ advocates hailed Ewing’s victory as evidence that Republican anti-trans campaigns are not popular with voters. Matt McDermott, a board member of the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund (a liberal PAC supporting LGBTQ+ candidates in the U.S.), celebrated the results as “[a] clear rejection of MAGA at the ballot box.”