Not commenting on whether Trump.will.win Ne02 or not but there is a lot of confidence which resembles 2016 about baselines. There clearly are states where 2020 was a baseline(Arizona, Colorado, Georgia in some ways) but it was a weird year elsewhere. Democrats did really poorly in Nebraska in 2022. They had a credible candidate for Governor who only managed 36%. And 63-36 was also the statewide house vote. Bacon won by 2.6% which is similar to the margin here.
It just seems strange to me to treat NE02 as safe Democratic when Trump won it in 2016, and no Democrat won it in 2022. By contrast, even as LePage was getting wiped out in 2022 he did decently in ME02.
I think it's solidly Lean D but the idea it is safe or likely to be lopsided seems to be reading too much into the numbers.
2022 is a mixture of states where Democrats advanced on 2022, and states where they fell back. The latter that received the most attention were the big blue states, but Democrats did very poorly on the Plains and in the Deep South. Nebraska and especially South Dakota(where Noem was supposed to be in a close race) stand out as underperformances.
