(Picture credit Lewis Thune)
Governor Jim Pillen’s reelection campaign hosted a brief event just a few blocks from the governor’s mansion Tuesday night, with Pillen announcing he and Lieutenant Governor Joe Kelly had agreed to stick together on the 2026 ticket.
“Joe and Suzie are saying yes to four more years,” Pillen told a small crowd of supporters and press. “I can’t tell you what a blessing to have Joe.”
Pillen took a few moments to “brag on Joe Kelly” before outlining the two men’s ongoing priorities. Foremost was Kelly’s work inside the Capitol.
“Joe has sat as president of the legislature — in the chair — virtually every minute,” he said. “Joe has led our office with making sure that blue’s voices are heard, and when there’s things that are breaking down, that we understand it and that we can fix it… one that nobody’s talking about: we’ve appointed 32 judges in three and a half years.”
Also of note were both men’s national relationships, with Kelly serving in the Governors Homeland Security Advisory Council and Pillen on the Board of Governors.
“Our office can compete with anybody in the United States,” Pillen said, specifically mentioning a familiar rival from his days as a Cornhusker.
“Thirty days in, I heard from the Governor of Oklahoma. Long story short, he said ‘I have an office of the Governor in Washington, D.C., and we rank 10th of 50 states in getting money for our state… I don’t know what you’ve all been doing in Nebraska, but you’re 49th of 50.’”
“I said, ‘Well for one thing, we ain’t gonna lose to Oklahoma for long.’” Since then, Pillen said, he and the unicameral together had secured an additional $3.5 billion in federal dollars for the state.
Kelly took the podium to recount his tenure as Lieutenant Governor and his primary focus on law enforcement as a former prosecutor.
“My career was in prosecution, almost 40 years,” he said. “It’s the first requirement of free enterprise. We have to have the government keeping us safe, keeping our property safe, keeping our children safe… We keep the town running, and the business guys like Jim Pillen can come in and do some great things.”
He recalled his actions as chair of the crime commission to drive recruiting for police forces.
“We made it a focus to increase training at the law enforcement center out in Grand Island. Jim authorized an increase in the staff,” he said. “This was especially hard after COVID… it was hard to recruit people into law enforcement, and especially hard if you were in Alliance, Nebraska, and couldn’t pay the kind of salary that they were paying in Omaha.”
He plugged the administration’s salary raise for the State Patrol and the free tuition mandate for law enforcement personnel and their families before mentioning matters of national safety.
“Pacific threats is another committee that I head up,” he said. “A lot of legislation in the last few years to say, ‘all right, we don’t want Chines entities owning ground near our military bases.”
He also applauded the Nebraska National Guard and Air Guard’s contributions at the southern border and overseas.
“Nobody’s been more supportive of them than Jim Pillen and this administration,” he said.
‘Running Government Like a Business’
Pillen and Kelly also spoke briefly about their current and ongoing priorities for a second term, which are mainly fiscal in nature, per Pillen’s longtime commitment to “run government like a business.”
“That means we say ‘no,’” Pillen said. “We need 33 people to be with us to say ‘no.’ No more spending, no more taking money home. It’s the people’s money, not the government’s.”
This approach is especially important, he noted, in light of the state’s present budgetary shortfall.
“There’s such a false dialogue about the budget. We are decreasing spending a billion dollars in the state. We decreased income tax, if you remember, from 6.8% to 3.99% in January, it’ll be. What that does is that save all of us a billion dollars — if we can all agree on the definition of a tax cut.”
A tax cut, he said, involves actual cuts.
“We save a billion, we decrease spending a billion, because if we don’t decrease spending a billion, that’s the definition of a tax shift — with 120 sales tax exemptions the last 47 years and not one decrease in spending.”
He also mentioned the widespread dietary health issues throughout Nebraska and the nation as a concern, which he hopes to address with changes to school lunch programs, bringing up his recent meetings with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. He also committed to the protection of Nebraska’s water, power, and values.
“We are not ever gonna have boys playing in girls’ sports. It’s really, really important that our university health system does not do surgeries on young people” he said, bringing up a recent conversation he’d had with a trans-identified adult male. “I got no problem… make the decision when you’re an adult, not when you’re a child.”
Pillen closed with a message about taking an innovative approach to governance.
“In business, if you’re doing the same thing you were doing five or six years ago, you know where you are? You’re broke. We have to start cleaning out the closets,” he said. “That’s where Joe and I are committed to the people of Nebraska… It’s a team sport, and if you don’t have your family with you, you’re up a creek without a paddle.”
— Lewis Thune is a writing fellow with The Plains Sentinel.