Nebraska Sen. Danielle Conrad has returned to politics as nonpartisan ‘voice of reason’
By ANDREW WEGLEY – Lincoln Journal Star, Neb. (TNS)
She had already convinced a committee stacked with Republican lawmakers to back her attempt to make it easier and cheaper for Nebraskans to access government records, but now, Sen. Danielle Conrad needed to make the case to the rest of Nebraska’s Legislature.
Conrad, a lifelong Democrat who served as a lawmaker for eight years before term limits forced her out in 2014, returned to the statehouse last year with hopes of restoring the nonpartisan spirit that she had watched wither as she spent nearly a decade on the sidelines.
A progressive championing government reform in a Legislature dominated by conservatives, she would need bipartisan support for her proposal to strengthen Nebraska’s public records law, an important policy objective for the civil rights attorney who led the ACLU of Nebraska for eight years between her first and second stints in the state’s formally nonpartisan Legislature.
So on a morning in early March, Conrad, 47, stood at her desk on the legislative floor and namedropped disparate interest groups as she warned of the “slow and steady evisceration of transparency” at the hands of government lawyers who, she said, had increasingly exploited various loopholes to make it harder and more expensive for Nebraskans to access government records — and had opposed her attempts to fight back.
“And whether it’s against Liberty Moms, folks who are skeptical about our elections, BLM activists, reporters or just everyday citizens who are concerned about the price of gravel,” she said, “I have seen a clamping down, from the top of state government down to local government, on the citizen’s right to know what their government is doing in their name and with their money.”
Sen. Danielle Conrad, 12.17
Sen. Danielle Conrad of Lincoln flips through a law book at her desk inside her Capitol office.
Conrad had worked to add into a larger bill flush with Republican-backed policies including one that would limit the state’s ability to restrict religious gatherings during a state of emergency, such as a pandemic. Still reeling from a bitterly divisive year in 2023 that had threatened the Legislature’s nonpartisan fabric and future, lawmakers approved the proposal on 39-0 vote in March, with 10 senators not voting.
For Conrad, the bill’s quiet passage and the bipartisan coalition of lawmakers who voted for it represent what Nebraska’s Legislature is supposed to be, what it used to be. That tradition was not on display when she returned to the arena in 2023, as deeply partisan fights over abortion and medical treatments for transgender youths defined Conrad’s first year back in the building where she had spent much of her 30s.
A monthslong filibuster brought lawmaking to a near standstill and divided the formally nonpartisan Legislature along party lines. The lawmakers who waged the filibuster threatened to burn this year’s session to the ground, too.
The divisive and sometimes personal battles that consumed the 2023 legislative session are antithetical to Conrad’s pragmatic nature and her dogmatic fidelity to the institution’s nonpartisan framework.
On the cusp of her 11th year in the statehouse, Conrad, who is now Nebraska’s longest-tenured sitting lawmaker, is as committed to the Legislature and its traditions as she has ever been — and clear-eyed about the obstacles she faces.
Term limits that took effect nearly 20 years ago have rendered the Legislature unrecognizable and increasingly partisan. Party divisions are intensified by cultural issues that have emerged as top policy priorities for Nebraska’s GOP and its Republican governor, who could enjoy a filibuster-proof majority for the next two years if his party mates in the Legislature vote in lockstep.
Amid the upheaval, the state’s executive branch has ignored oversight laws put in place by lawmakers and refused to implement others.
But those barriers, somehow, only fuel Conrad’s faith in an independent legislative body.
“I’m an optimist by nature,” she said in a recent interview. “I mean, I think in some ways you have to be to do this work, but in other ways, I think it’s just how I’m wired. And I also think that lens has really benefited my ability to be successful in the political arena as well.
“If you didn’t think you could make a difference, you wouldn’t run for public office, right?”
From Seward to the statehouse
The arc that carried Danielle Conrad — born Danielle Nantkes in August 1977 — from her childhood home north of Seward to north Lincoln’s District 46 seat in Nebraska’s Capitol began to take shape in 1986, when Conrad, not yet 10 years old, “literally had one of those lightning bolt moments,” she said.
As the nation’s first gubernatorial race between two women candidates played out on the local news, Democratic candidate Helen Boosalis captured Conrad’s attention and heart.
Her parents — a public school teacher and a deputy sheriff — had always been active in their community, but not in politics. Still, they recognized their daughter’s transfixion and cultivated it, driving her to Boosalis’ campaign headquarters in Lincoln where she gathered campaign stickers and yard signs.
“I went back home to rural Seward County and walked my section and my Republican farmer neighbors let me put up yard signs,” she recalled.
One hangs in Conrad’s office on the first floor of the Capitol today.
Around two months after Boosalis’ loss to Republican Kay Orr had left Conrad “heartbroken,” she ran into her political idol shopping at a department store in Lincoln.
“And the way my mom likes to tell the story, I was speechless for the first and last time in my life,” she said.
The interaction that followed led Boosalis to visit Conrad’s rural school in Staplehurst in April 1987 for a lesson on politics and public service from the former mayor of Nebraska’s capital city, an occasion so big that Conrad’s mom made a dress with a matching scrunchie for her daughter to wear to fourth grade that day.
Sen. Danielle Conrad, 12.17
Sen. Danielle Conrad of Lincoln points to photos from early political involvement in her life on display inside her Capitol office. In the top photo, a young Conrad is with her future mentor, Lincoln Mayor Helen Boosalis. The bottom photo shows Conrad with her mother wearing a sash saying “1996 voter,” the year she could legally vote.
“And then from that point forward, Helen became my mentor, and then ultimately, my friend, and we wrote letters back and forth to each other … for decades,” Conrad said.
Her writings to the one-time gubernatorial candidate, she said, were scrawled on “little kid stationery and would say things like, ‘Dear Mrs. Boosalis, I made you a friendship bracelet. P.S., what do you think about crime?'”
Decades after their happenstance meeting at Miller & Paine — after Conrad had joined the Seward County Democratic Party at 18, earned business and law degrees from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and clerked for the advocacy nonprofit Nebraska Appleseed when it was “the size of a broom closet,” she said — Boosalis introduced Conrad at her campaign launch event when she kicked off her first run for the Legislature in 2006.
After a second-place finish in the nonpartisan primary sent the 29-year-old attorney on to a general election matchup with Carol Brown that November, District 46 voters sent Conrad to the Legislature, where she was among a freshman class of 22 lawmakers who encountered “authentic, legitimate, intentional collegiality” upon their arrival in a body that had been reshaped by term limits, but not yet upended by them.
Roads bill advances
Sens. Danielle Conrad (from left), Heath Mello, and Amanda McGill strategize during the 2011 session.
The Legislature of that era did not avoid divisive policy debates. In Conrad’s first stint at the statehouse, Nebraska lawmakers in 2010 became the first in the country to ban most abortions 20 weeks after conception based on the theory that a fetus, by that stage in pregnancy, had the capacity to feel pain.
Conrad was one of five lawmakers to vote against the bill, which had far too much support to justify a filibuster that opponents would be able to overcome — after hours of debate.
Instead, the north Lincoln senator lodged her futile opposition to the bill in floor speeches that revolved around legal precedent that protected abortion rights until fetal viability and the testimony of health care professionals and scientists who opposed the proposal and questioned its underlying theory.
“I think we respected each other, we challenged each other on the issues, on what we fund,” said former Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican who led the state for all of Conrad’s first term in the Legislature and signed the 2010 abortion bill into law. “But, again, I always respected her. I knew that she would do her homework and she was always very knowledgeable about issues. And that’s the kind of vigorous debate you should have.”
State of the State address
Former Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman (center) pauses to shake hands with Nebraska senators as Sen. Danielle Conrad escorts him from the legislative chamber following the annual State of the State address Jan. 13, 2011.
Conrad’s attack of the abortion legislation was impersonal by design.
She knew her opposition to the bill stood no chance. But the rest of her legislative agenda counted on her collegiality.
“If we were able to stay in relationship during those hard points, it was ultimately for the benefit of the institution and each other and the state,” she recalled. “Because if you stay upset and angry and divisive over one policy issue, you never have the chance to be successful when your agenda hits the floor.”
“I know there are some times when all you have available is to stand witness to something that you disagree with, and all you can do is make a speech,” she added. “That’s still a lot and that’s meaningful and that’s important. But the senators that I’ve served with that I admire the most over the years are the people who figured out how to get results.”
‘The most important broker’
When term limits forced her into what she refers to as “constitutional retirement” in 2014, Danielle Conrad did not stray far from the statehouse. As the director of the ACLU of Nebraska, she helped draft and champion legislation, maintaining a frequent presence at the Capitol and relationships with her former colleagues whose terms hadn’t expired.
Danielle Conrad
Danielle Conrad, then the executive director of the ACLU, speaks during a legislative hearing in 2018.
“I was very clear-eyed about how the institution had changed,” she said. “I was very clear-eyed about what was happening. I know many of my colleagues who came back to the Legislature were, I think, disappointed in the rise of partisanship and how that impacted their work and public policy in Nebraska, and I really wanted to make sure that, when I decided to reenter public life, that I wouldn’t be frustrated by change dynamics.”
That pledge was immediately tested by the acrimonious and deeply partisan legislative session Conrad encountered upon her return in 2023. Republicans chasing a deeply conservative social agenda clashed with Democrats intent on making GOP policy victories labored and scrutinized.
Lawmakers left town two days earlier than scheduled, a 12-week abortion ban and restrictions on gender-affirming care for transgender youths already signed into law by Gov. Jim Pillen. They left, too, Conrad said, with a shared understanding “we wanted it to be a one-off instead of the new normal in Nebraska.”
They reconvened in January hoping to avoid the rancor of 2023.
“And we did it,” Conrad said. “And I think it was probably the greatest and maybe swiftest political turnaround in American political history.”
Many of her colleagues credit the reversal, in part, to Conrad, who emerged in 2024 as the negotiator she intended to be upon her return to the Legislature.
Legislature, 8.13
Sens. George Dungan of Lincoln (from left), John Fredrickson of Omaha, Danielle Conrad of Lincoln, John Cavanaugh of Omaha, Carol Blood of Bellevue, and Terrell McKinney of Omaha meet to the side of the chamber amid debate on a controversial tax plan during the special legislative session at the Capitol in August.
Omaha Sen. Megan Hunt, a progressive who was among lawmakers nearest the center of the animosity in 2023 and who was a noticeably quieter presence on the legislative floor this year, called Conrad “the most important broker between the left and the right.”
“The only mode I really have is fight, but Danielle can turn it way down and get the same result as a fighter, and that is so important,” she said. “We wouldn’t get anything if we didn’t have people who could do that.”
“When I feel like I’m freaking out — which I do less and less as time goes on, actually — I just think, ‘What would Danielle do?'”
Sen. John Cavanaugh of Omaha, a Democrat who is among the Legislature’s leading pragmatists, said Conrad is quick to re-center policy debates that veer off course on the legislative floor, often reminding her colleagues in plainspoken language what is important: Nebraskans.
“She is somebody who shows up every day, ready to work, ready to find a way forward on issues but is principled,” he said. “It’s hard to find people who can maintain their principles but also work towards compromise. And I think that’s a space that she occupies.”
The role Conrad has played as an intermediary between progressives and conservatives in the Capitol is evident in her frequent conversations with Speaker John Arch, Republican from La Vista who said he and Conrad “found a great deal of commonality in our passion for the institution of the Legislature.”
“What I’ve appreciated was there were times that she was a clear voice of reason,” Arch said. “And that brought people to be reasonable.”
Legislature, 8.13
Sen. Danielle Conrad of Lincoln speaks with Speaker John Arch of La Vista during the special legislative session at the Capitol on Aug. 13.
Conrad is playing the role she intended to when she returned to the Legislature and to a political arena so different than the one she left a decade ago.
She is still advocating for civil rights and working families as a lawmaker, but perhaps as importantly, she is advocating for the restoration of nonpartisanship, pragmatism and reason as the Legislature’s prevailing principles.
Her approach is not without controversy. She has taken “a fair amount of flak,” she said, from progressives over her willingness to engage with lawmakers who do not share her values.
But she insists it is more important now than ever to talk with political opponents. And she is unconvinced there is a better way for the Legislature to operate than how it used to, how it is supposed to.
“People ask me a lot, they’re like, ‘Oh, are you glad you came back? Am I glad I came back?'” she said. “And I generally try and explain it this way: perhaps it’s not quite as much fun as the first eight years that I served. But I think it’s more important than ever that I’m here.”
Sen. Danielle Conrad, 12.17
Notes from Sen. Danielle Conrad’s children, Caroline and Will, can be seen on the whiteboard inside her office at the Capitol.
Sen. Danielle Conrad, 12.17
Sen. Danielle Conrad of Lincoln looks for a book on the shelf inside her legislative office on Dec. 17 at the Capitol.
Sen. Danielle Conrad, 12.17
Sen. Danielle Conrad of Lincoln stands for a portrait in her office at the Capitol next to a taxidermy replica of the largemouth bass she caught to make her a Master Angler of Nebraska. Conrad caught the fish in Butler County on a trip with her parents and the replica fish was a gift from her mother.
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