An Omaha Socialist Lays Out His Agenda for Nebraska

by Dave Mastio

(Photo credit Joyce Vondrasek)

Joyce Vondrasek, a thirty-five-year-old Democratic Socialist, has already run for the Nebraska Legislature in District 9 in Omaha once. With the wave of recent primary and general election victories by candidates sharing his political views across the country, he’s feeling inspired and hoping that he’ll have the wind at his back in his next try.

The Plains Sentinel interviewed Vondrasek last week to discuss his vision for what a Democratic Socialist agenda would look like in Nebraska.

Plains Sentinel: Do the Democratic Socialist victories in New York and Colorado inspire you?

Joyce Vondrasek: Yes, absolutely. Especially in these safe blue districts, you know, and these places where Democrats have majorities, we need to have the conversations about what kind of person we are sending to the government. Are we sending a status quo candidate, or are we sending a candidate who’s going to challenge the Republicans, but also the Democratic Party establishment to be better in the state of Nebraska.

Right now, we have a situation where Dan Osborn is running for Senate because the Democratic Party has been completely unable to field a candidate for statewide office for almost my entire life. The last Democrat I remember winning was Ben Nelson defeating Pete Ricketts, I think, in 2006, maybe. We haven’t won anything close to that in so long. And if Dan Osborn wins, the Democratic Party in Nebraska is going to have to take a serious look in the mirror and ask themselves, like, we’ve been doing the same thing for 40 years and hasn’t been working. Are we going to change or not? And as far as I can tell, the answer is still no. They don’t want to change.

Plains Sentinel: What do you think about New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani?

Vondrasek: I love him. I have a problem where I’m very cynical, and sometimes I get angry about things. I’m a very angry person. I’m a gay man. There’s lots to be angry about in the state of Nebraska for gay people right now. So I use him as an example. I try to sort of emulate his positivity. I try to stop before I say something. I think, how do I stay positive? I know what Mamdani would do because that’s how he won stuff. My intention is to start going out to public events and things and sort of hold up a sign that says, “Tell me what you think about the street car” or “Do you support the idea of a train between Omaha and Lincoln?” and sort of do man on the street, things like that? Like, he started his campaign with.

Plains Sentinel: Does Omaha or even your part of Omaha need rent control?

Vondrasek: I think rent control is one of those solutions that is a good Band-Aid. I do support rent control. I would support it, but I don’t think I would be the person to introduce a rent control bill in the state of Nebraska. We need a social public housing program where the government has entered the housing market, owns units and uses those units as leverage to affect the rents of the rest of the market to lower rents of the rest of the market. I think that’s the most effective way to secure housing for people and to secure lower rents for people in the short and long term.

Plains Sentinel: Nebraska has a budget deficit this year. What would you do? What are your ideas for how we close that?

Vondrasek: So my understanding is that Nebraska didn’t have a budget deficit very recently and that the Republican Party passed just a few pieces of legislation that have truly upended the state’s budget in a very short amount of time.

So again, I think we’re looking at a situation on a national level, but also here on a local level where Republicans are perfectly fine wrecking the economy even when they’re in a super majority status and they control the economy for 30, 40 years, and then they’ll still just point to liberal Democrats and be like the, the way they wanted to do things didn’t work. And so they’re really just incompetent or purposely sabotaging the status quo. Like I said, that Democratic socialist agreement where people have the money to participate as consumers, they’re attacking and undermining that at all costs. And it looks in different ways, like undermining public education on purpose because you want people to be so stupid that they can’t fight back against politicians.

I truly believe the Republican agenda is anti-democratic. They are trying to undermine every part of civil society to leave capitalists and rich oligarchs like Pete Ricketts in control of our government.

Plains Sentinel: Medicare for All?

Vondrasek: Yes. 100%. It should start on the local level. Like we need to be advocating for a public option in Nebraska. If Mitt Romney can pass Romneycare in Massachusetts way back in 2006, I think we can try something like that in the state of Nebraska. And Democrats absolutely should be using that as a wedge against Republicans. If Republicans are going to use transgender kids as a wedge in politics, why shouldn’t we use public health care as a wedge in politics on the state level?

Plains Sentinel: So Republicans have already started to say people like you aren’t just socialists, you’re straight-up communists. What do you say to that? What’s the difference between a democratic socialist and a communist? And why is it important?

Vondrasek: So a Democrat socialist is a person who, in theory, believes a future socialist economy is achievable through slow Democratic reforms over time. Slow changes of peaceful revolution, if you will. A communist is a person who believes that the capitalists probably aren’t going to let us have a peaceful revolution and things are going to have to get feisty. And I am a socialist. I ran openly as a socialist. I believe in the words of John F. Kennedy, who said, if you refuse to let a peaceful Revolution happen, you’re going to get a violent Revolution.

And as far as I can tell so far, the capitalist class in this country is working very hard to make sure that people like Mamdani and the political movement that is behind us do not succeed. We’ve seen that come repeatedly from the Democratic Party 2016 and 2020, 2024, and they’re losing their grip on the party now. Things are really starting to change in this country, and it’s getting interesting. A peaceful revolution is looking possible in this moment. And so I’m happy to keep running for public office and advocating and organizing in the community.

Plains Sentinel: What do you think of Omaha’s street car?

Vondrasek: Omaha needs public transit for the entire city, and we need politicians who are going to build public transit and make plans for public transit that are going to serve the entire city, not just be a cute little thing for Mutual of Omaha and the real estate developers.

Plains Sentinel: Does Omaha need subways or what’s your vision?

Vondrasek: I think there are places in Omaha that call for almost every different type of train that might be available to us. I think east of 72nd Street on Dodge, I think subways might be called for because it’s very hilly and it would be obstructive to create an above ground over the road sort of situation. And I think it’s just easier to do it underground. I think that’s much more feasible than people realize it might be for Omaha. Although, of course, it would be expensive. And I also think that train corridors like Highway 75 and 72nd Street, 144th Street, like they were recommended in a 2010 beltway study. Much more feasible than people think and we need to pursue those options soon. Also on other corridors like Maple and L Street are good candidates for light rail.

Plains Sentinel: How would you pay for that?

Vondrasek: So I think that that’s why I’m part of why I’m running for state senate. There have been efforts in the past to create new tax brackets to essentially raise taxes on richer Nebraskans. Nebraska has what I would call stupid tax system where the same person who makes $150,000, faces the same tax brackets as Warren Buffett. Buffett himself has talked about that. Nebraska’s income tax structure is kind of regressive, frankly, and it lets rich people off of a lot of tax liability. We could change that just a little bit. You know, we don’t have to go back to the 1950s and 60s where Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, had the income tax in the 90s and the 80 percentile ranges. We can just raise taxes by one or two or, gosh, five percent and then really accomplish a lot of really cool things and build new infrastructure and accomplish things with public transit that we need to be doing for a climate change agenda.

Plains Sentinel: Since we’re talking about the sage of Omaha. What do you think of California’s wealth tax?

Vondrasek: I’m not as familiar with California’s wealth tax, although I think I just heard Gavin Newsom say he now supports creating a national wealth tax.

Plains Sentinel: Lots of places have repealed it. California has it on the ballot for this fall. The idea is to put a small tax on your net assets.

Vondrasek: There’s a strong argument to be made for the redistribution of wealth in this country, you know, by force with electoral measures like this. I think that we’ve experienced 50 years of wealth being siphoned away from working class people in the form of wages and benefits. I absolutely would support efforts to do sort of small one-time efforts or long-term things like that to redistribute wealth in the United States. Absolutely.

Plains Sentinel: Is the $15 minimum wage enough to get that started in Nebraska? Or what do you think the minimum wage should be?

Vondrasek: I do not think the $15 minimum wage is enough. I earn $21.50 at my job at Omaha’s bike share nonprofit, and I still live paycheck to paycheck. I am not really able to save money in any meaningful way. I do think that when we see that line graph that everyone knows about where the productivity keeps going up, but then wages flatline somewhere around the 1970s or 80s, that missing triangle of wages, that’s the money we’re talking about that needs to be redistributed back to the working class.

People in my generation, we are being shortchanged. The minimum wage needs to be raised significantly. Twenty-five or 30 is a good place to start. That might sound radical to people. I just saw an argument about the teen unemployment rate. Has now “skyrocketed” in Nebraska because of the people who are insisting on raising wages in Lincoln and Omaha opposed to the way that the legislature has undermined the minimum wage bill. And I think that there’s always going to be blowback when you raise a wage like that. It’s always going to be a short-term hit where businesses do have to pay their employees more and they’re going to feel the effect in their bank account.

The very next cycle two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, all of those employees have more money. All those workers have more money. They go out and spend it and they stimulate the economy. That’s what the raising the minimum wage does. You’ve really gotten away from the basic sort of democratic socialist principle for the American economy of we’re going to pay workers enough to consume things in the economy and participate in the economy as consumers.

Plains Sentinel: When that’s your starting place. How can you appeal broadly in a state that’s as red as Nebraska?

Vondrasek: Well. Frankly, I’m just trying to appeal to the voters in Legislative District 9. I’m perfectly happy to have a message that might scare people in a more conservative district. But I did grow up here in this “safe” blue district. There is a change happening in the Democratic Party and there’s change happening in voters who consider themselves safe blue voters. And we’re going to start demanding more. We’re going to raise the bar. Socialists would like to offer this district the choice of someone who’s going to push a little bit harder and who’s going to make their priority to actually build something like a commuter train.

Plains Sentinel: Your position on abortion?

Vondrasek: I am so pro-abortion it hurts. Abortion is good. It is a social good when women are allowed to get abortions whenever they need them.

Plains Sentinel: What’s the most important thing that Americans should remember on the 250th anniversary of the 4th of July?

Vondrasek: That things can change and that we should change them? Our Founding Fathers thought that we would write a new Constitution within 25 years of the original one being written.

And we have not done that. We’ve only made a few amendments and we haven’t made many amendments recently. And I think that we should strongly consider that it would be good to create some national unity in around writing a completely new Constitution. And completely revamping our democracy using other countries as examples moving forward.

Plains Sentinel: What countries would you look at?

Vondrasek: Any country that’s a parliament, I think we should abolish the Senate. I think the entire executive branch should be subsumed into legislative branch and we should have a prime minister who is immediately recallable by our elected representatives. I think the United States’ political story is a story of the expansion of way too much executive power. That is a part of what allows the United States government to act like a hegemonic bully on the world stage.

And if we could create a political movements to sublimate the executive power to that of the legislative branch, I think that would go a long way to improving our relations in the world and also just our economy and everything else in general.

Plains Sentinel: Would you keep the First Amendment?

Vondrasek: Absolutely. Yeah, I, I would be in jail right now without the First Amendment. My chalk activities around town. I would have literally been arrested for exercising my First Amendment rights. Absolutely. For sure.

(Interviewer and interviewee fist bump)

Plains Sentinel: What do you think about tariffs? Should Nebraska workers compete with workers who get slave wages and have no environmental protection?

Vondrasek: The way that Donald Trump has employed tariffs has been a farce. Anybody who’s read Herbert Hoover’s Wikipedia page should understand that tariffs have a specific place in our modern economy. They really should not be weaponized in the way they have been. There is a job of our federal government to negotiate some of those things. There’s also a job for state government to protect Nebraska workers in some level. There’s an argument for some tariffs at a reasonable scale.

Plains Sentinel: Nebraska has recently lost meat packing jobs by the hundreds and cereal plant jobs by the hundreds. How would your approach be to economic development in Nebraska and building jobs and, and bringing economic opportunity here?

Vondrasek: So there’s already a Kawasaki plant in Lincoln where they build passenger train cars and then ship them all over the world to be put into use for different places. I would build a commuter train between Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska, and I would start there and I would use that as an example to argue for an expansion of commuter trains between Lincoln and Omaha and other cities in the state like it used to be, building a modern passenger train Network instead of investing in Interstate Highway expansion.

I think that will create jobs, build the trains. And then as we move forward, Transit is required for a climate change economy moving forward. It’s an integral part of the plans that we need to reduce car traffic, reduce pollution, Etc. And high-speed rail, intercity trains, subways, and light rails within cities. Nebraska could be a place where a lot of factories build trains and then ship those to other states to build new train infrastructure that we’re going to build in the United States.

Plains Sentinel: California spent more than a hundred billion dollars and has gotten almost nowhere. That’s a super majority Democratic state. What would you do different? What are they doing wrong? What’s the lesson?

Vondrasek: Big point about a super majority Democratic state, even within the Democratic Party in California, there are detractors who do not support public transit in the ways that they should.

Second point, California is doing something that has never been done before in the United States. It is literally brand new technology, brand new ideas that are being built and implemented, and therefore it is going to be more expensive to start doing and do things like that in a place where it’s never been done before. The solution is not to doubt what’s happening, but to continue on with the thing that we know is good and right to do. I advocate for high-speed rail transcontinental high speed rail in the United States.

Nebraska’s economy and population is the size it is today, because of the transcontinental railroad that was built through Omaha when it was first built. Had that railroad not been built through Omaha, we’d have the same population as North Dakota and Omaha would be smaller than Lincoln. If we allow high-speed trains across the country to go through Kansas City or to go north for some reason, we’re going to miss out on the economic development that will come with those things.

I want a huge new train station serving high-speed trains and commuter trains to other cities in downtown Omaha between our two historic train stations below.

Plains Sentinel: What do you think of Trump’s policy of taking ownership stakes in companies that need government help like AI computer chips and steel?

Vondrasek: That’s so funny because, like, normally I’m like a, there’s a nationalized button in front of me. I’m going to hit that button kind of guy, especially when it comes to train infrastructure. But I think that Donald Trump is doing something that’s more akin to open corruption. You know, he’s taking government stakes, he’s giving contracts to his buddies. It’s very clearly a grift. However, we can and should be making targeted investments in certain Industries.

I’m a huge proponent of social public housing, which would involve the federal and state governments entering the housing market and buying current units, but also building new housing units where multiple different class levels live together in communities, and everyone would pay a fixed rent that would remain low because the government was trying to compete at lower prices in general. That’s one way that the government could enter a market in a good way.

Plains Sentinel: Should Nebraska own part of Berkshire Hathaway?

Vondrasek: What part of Berkshire Hathaway? The railroads? I don’t know. I was more thinking five or ten percent or again. Has that been proposed?

Plains Sentinel: Just thinking of socialist things that could happen in Nebraska.

Vondrasek: You know, there is an argument to be made that Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are just sitting on this land and not really investing in modern electrifying, even their freight trains or anything like that. They’re just sort of reaping the profits as they come in from the oil and the coal. I don’t want to be the guy who’s like, we’re gonna take the land from Union Pacific to build this train. I want to approach Union Pacific and say, listen, if we build a train, it can benefit you also. Like, we want to build a modern electric commuter train.

Help us, you know, reinvest and rebuild your freight infrastructure along the same route and we’ll do it together. You know, it doesn’t have to be a lose- lose situation. I don’t think we need to invest in a private company like that. I don’t think that’s necessarily required.

Editor’s Note: This interview was edited for length, clarity, and style.

David Mastio is a Papillion resident and a former National Columnist for The Kansas City Star and Deputy Editorial Page Editor of USA TODAY.