Pete Ricketts is the favorite to keep Nebraska's Senate seat, and independent Dan Osborn is a live underdog rather than a long shot. Kalshi has priced it that way since the Democratic nominee left the ballot in July, and our AI panel, scoring without seeing the market, landed within a cent of where traders had it in August. Since then a SurveyUSA poll, from a nonpartisan pollster with a Democratic-tagged sponsor, put Osborn ahead, and Kalshi moved him from 28 cents to 31 in the two hours after it posted, and since Tuesday he has not traded outside 29 to 32. The Osborn line still sits two to three cents above the panel's number instead of below it. A counter-poll and a leaked recording of Osborn's own voice have arrived since. The board moved one cent on Ricketts and none on Osborn, and the night the recording surfaced, the Ricketts contract printed the largest single trade in the tape Kalshi serves.
The Quick Answer
As of early Sunday morning, September 20, 2026, Kalshi prices Pete Ricketts at 68 to 69 cents and Dan Osborn at 31 to 32 cents. The Democratic line is dead money because no Democrat is on the ballot. Our price-blind panel, in its August 19 run, put Ricketts at a seat-median 70% and Osborn at 29%. Ricketts is a real favorite, Osborn is a real underdog, and the whole gap between them is Nebraska's partisan lean.
The race is strange for a state this red. Ricketts, the former two-term governor appointed to the seat in 2023 and elected in the 2024 special, is running for a full term. Osborn, a former union leader running with no party label, lost to Sen. Deb Fischer by 6.6 points in 2024 with no Democrat on that ballot either, and this time he gets the same one-on-one matchup in a midterm instead of a presidential year.
The Board
Prices are Kalshi's best buy and sell quotes, fetched early Sunday morning, September 20, 2026. Both live books are a cent wide, so quote them as a range. The panel column is the revised round, after each model read the others' anonymized reasoning.
| Seat | Ricketts (R) | Osborn (I) | Democrat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fable | 70% | 29% | 1% |
| Claude Opus | 71% | 28% | 1% |
| Claude Sonnet | 67% | 32% | 1% |
| GLM | 71% | 28% | 1% |
| DeepSeek | 68% | 31% | 1% |
| Seat Median (Blend) | 70% | 29% | 1% |
| Market (Kalshi) | 68/69¢ | 31/32¢ | under 1¢ |
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: Claude Opus 85% on 578 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 84% on 556 graded calls · GLM 81% on 2,367 graded calls · DeepSeek 80% on 2,392 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
Model estimates generated August 19, 2026, price-blind from live fetched data, then revised in an anonymized cross-read. Five of the panel's eight seats scored this board; the blend is the seat median of the five revised numbers. Models are frequently wrong; the market price reflects real traders' money.
What Moved Since September 16
This page last pulled prices on the afternoon of September 16, minutes after a seller hit the Ricketts bid for 47,606 contracts at 68 and about six hours before the print that is the whole story of this edition. Against that afternoon board, Ricketts is up one cent, from 67 bid and 68 offered to 68 and 69, and Osborn is unchanged at 31 and 32. The Democratic line still trades for a fraction of a cent. Those are quiet numbers, and they hide the largest single print in the tape Kalshi serves for this contract.
That Monday and Wednesday are on the record. On Monday, September 14, a SurveyUSA poll of 503 likely voters, credibility interval plus or minus 6.4 points, had Osborn 46 and Ricketts 42; it posted at 1:15 p.m. ET and Osborn went from 28 to 31 in the two hours after, on 74,608 contracts for the day. On Wednesday, Wedgewood Polls had Ricketts 52 and Osborn 48 among 500 likely voters, margin of error plus or minus 4.4, and I still cannot establish what time of day it posted. No poll has been released since.
What did arrive Wednesday was a recording. The Omaha World-Herald published audio it says it obtained and verified with a participant, from "a campaign-related event early this summer," in which Osborn describes a hypothetical Trump supporter, "Billy Bob in Red Cloud, Nebraska" (profanity omitted throughout), who backs the president because "all he knows is that he's on the winning team," and says of such voters that "their lives probably suck so bad." Asked on CNN whether that was him, Osborn said "It sure sounds like me," called it "out of character for myself," and added, "I would apologize to those people that might be offended, but I gotta tell them, I feel their pain." CNN's write-up is stamped 5:35 p.m. ET. By 7:40 p.m. ET, WOWT was carrying a statement from Ricketts: "Dan Osborn continues to show us who he really is. His comments show a clear lack of respect for the Nebraskans who make this state great."
At 9:42:10 p.m. ET, a single second of trading took 212,098 Ricketts contracts at 68 cents: a 202,098-lot and a 10,000-lot, both buyer-initiated, both filled at 68, the level the afternoon's seller had knocked the market down to. The 202,098-contract print by itself is 27% of everything the Ricketts contract has traded since it listed, 759,545 contracts at this fetch, and nearly seven times the next-largest print in the tape Kalshi serves back to July 14, which was the 30,000-lot inside that 3:05 p.m. sale. Open interest says it was new money on both sides of the trade: 311,683 contracts at Tuesday's close, 346,987 at the afternoon stamp, 559,401 at Wednesday's close, and 578,359 at this fetch, up 231,372 from the stamp. The number I keep coming back to is not the size but the price. A buyer took more than 200,000 contracts and never had to pay 69, which tells you how much Ricketts supply was resting on that offer the night the recording aired. I cannot tell you who the buyer was or whether the recording was the reason; the order of events is the only thing the tape proves.
The three days after were thin and two-sided: a 100-contract print at 72 and a 1,656-contract sweep down to 67 on Thursday, both too small to mean anything; 6,000 sold at 68 and 8,000 bought at 69 within eleven minutes on Friday morning, 17,342 for the day; 1,754 on Saturday. Then at 12:17 a.m. ET Sunday a seller hit the bid for 27,030 contracts at 68, the biggest print since Wednesday night, and eleven seconds later a buyer took 551 Osborn contracts at 32. Ricketts still closed this fetch bid 68, offered 69.
Osborn's tape is the quiet one. Since the afternoon stamp he has printed 15,856 contracts at a size-weighted 31.4 cents and has not traded outside 30 to 32: 4,382 sold at 31 on Thursday at 4:20 p.m., 2,172 bought at 31 on Friday at 12:04 p.m., 2,237 bought at 32 on Saturday at 10:47 a.m. His open interest moved 1,926 contracts. A recording that put his own words on cable news did not cost him a cent on Kalshi, and the counter-poll did not either. Every rater I can check on its own site is where it was: the Economist and RealClearPolitics at Lean Republican, the rest at Likely Republican. One aggregator table lists a Toss-up call I could not verify on the rater's own site, so I do not count it.
The book at this fetch says the next move will be expensive in either direction. Ricketts has 81,414 contracts bid at 68 and 32,084 at 67 beneath him, 239,313 contracts offered at 69 above him, and a 100,100-contract bid parked at 53 that only matters if the race turns. Osborn's ceiling has the same shape at smaller scale: 13,127 offered at 32 and 32,900 at 33, against 4,699 bid at 31. Whoever wants to print Ricketts at 70 or Osborn at 34 has to eat a wall first. What a 31-cent Osborn actually buys depends on what a Ricketts contract pays on, and that is the next section.
The case for each side of the Nebraska (NE) Senate race, priced on Kalshi: Why Pete Ricketts (R) Will Win the Nebraska Senate Race
What the Contracts Actually Pay On
One wrinkle changes how you read the board. The "Ricketts" line is a party contract: it pays on any Republican sworn in for the 2027 term, and the Democratic line pays on any Democrat. Only the Osborn contract names a person. Since Ricketts is the Republican and no Democrat remains on the ballot, the party lines track the two named candidates, but a late replacement or write-in would resolve on the party, not the name. That is why every seat left the Democratic line at 1% instead of zero. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, 2026, and the market resolves at the January swearing-in.
Why Ricketts Is the Favorite
Nebraska's partisan lean does most of the work. The state carries a Cook PVI of R+10, Donald Trump carried it comfortably in 2024, and most major handicappers rate the race Likely Republican; the Economist and RealClearPolitics have it a notch softer at Lean Republican. Ricketts adds incumbency, statewide name recognition from two terms as governor, and a large early spending edge, including negative ads against Osborn. On the ratings alone, a seat like this wins well up in the 80s. The panel sits below that number for the reasons in the next section, but the ratings are why this is a clear favorite and not a coin flip.
Why Osborn Is Still Live
Three things keep Osborn a real underdog. He has run this exact play before and nearly won, losing to Fischer by 6.6 points in a presidential year when Trump was on the ballot boosting Republican turnout. As in 2024, no Democrat is on the ballot, so the anti-incumbent vote consolidates instead of splitting; our GLM seat called that the whole case, and the difference this cycle is the turnout map, not the ballot. And the national climate leans hard against the president's party, with the panel's data card showing presidential approval near 37% and a generic ballot around Democrats +6.6. Whether that is worth 31 cents or more is the argument the market is having with itself.
What the Polls Say
Read the sponsor before the topline. When the panel ran, public polling was sparse and almost entirely from Democratic firms or Osborn's own campaign, ranging from a statistical tie to Osborn +5 in a May 2026 Democratic poll, and the models were told to treat every figure as directional. That changed on September 14. SurveyUSA, a nonpartisan pollster working for a sponsor that Pollsmax tags as Democratic, has Osborn up 4, and two days later Wedgewood Polls has Ricketts up 4; the tape on both is in the What Moved section above. A Pollsmax average that now counts both September polls has Ricketts up 5.8 points, 50.3 to 44.5, further ahead than either September poll shows, so the average is still doing more than averaging the toplines. The polling nudged the panel a little off the ratings number and no further, and the panel has not seen either September poll.
Why There Is No Democrat on the Ballot
Cindy Burbank won the Democratic primary with about 89.5% of the vote. She then filed to be removed from the ballot on July 17 and was confirmed off it by July 21, having signaled she would step aside for Osborn. Nebraska's Secretary of State publicly criticized the withdrawal as a manipulation of the ballot process, and the primary season drew competing allegations of "planted" candidates from both camps. Both sets of allegations remain contested. For the market, the mechanical result is what matters: the Democratic contract has no candidate to resolve YES.
Where the Panel Changed Its Mind
The first pass spread from 64% Ricketts to 78%. After the cross-read the seats converged to a 67% to 71% band, and they got there from opposite directions.
Our Sonnet seat opened highest on Ricketts and revised down to 67%, weighing "a hostile midterm environment and no Democrat splitting the anti-incumbent vote." Our Opus seat opened lowest and revised up to 71%, citing the R+10 lean and "unanimous Likely/Lean-R ratings." Fable held near 70% both rounds. When the optimist and the pessimist meet in the middle and the steady seat is already there, that is as much agreement as a panel produces.
Every number on this page lands in our backtest ledger the day it is generated and is graded against the certified result on the public model verdict scoreboard. Model estimates are not advice, and Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange, not a sportsbook.
The Bottom Line
Nebraska is a one-question race: can a well-known independent, one-on-one against a Republican incumbent in an R+10 state, turn a hostile national climate and a 2024 near-miss into an upset? Traders and a blind panel both say probably not, and both say it is closer than the state's color suggests. This page said a nonpartisan public poll was the thing most likely to move either of them, and on September 14 one arrived and moved Osborn three cents in two hours. Two days later a leaked recording surfaced, and that night 212,098 Ricketts contracts printed in one second; the board moved one cent. The panel ran before either existed, so for now the market is the fresher of the two numbers.
Prices on this page are Kalshi's book. If you also trade on Polymarket, code OS4 gets new users a $50 trading bonus on a $10 deposit — affiliate link; terms as stated by Polymarket; 18+, availability varies by state.
More on this: 2026 Senate Races: Every Kalshi Board We Track · Nebraska Senate Odds 2026: Ricketts Vs. Osborn On Kalshi · Why Pete Ricketts (R) Will Win the Nebraska Senate Race · Maine Senate 2026: Collins vs Jackson on Kalshi · Michigan Senate 2026: Rogers vs El-Sayed on Kalshi · Minnesota Governor And Senate Odds 2026
