Nebraska Democratic Senate nominee open to legalizing marijuana

By Deena Winter | Nebraska Watchdog

LINCOLN, Neb. — Nebraska’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate says he’s open to legalizing marijuana.

“I think we should give very serious consideration to legalization of marijuana,” Dave Domina said on KFOR’s Coby Mach Show Thursday. “If I were a philosopher king, we wouldn’t have it, but I’m not and we need to spend our law enforcement dollars as intelligently as we can. That’s not on marijuana enforcement.”

Domina said Wednesday on KLIN’s Drive Time Lincoln show that some drugs could be “converted to medicinals.”

“I’m not so sure marijuana should be different than what Colorado does with it, although we should be much more organized about legalizing it than Colorado was,” he said.

The other three candidates in the race, Republican nominee Ben Sasse and independents Todd Watson and Jim Jenkins, haven’t yet responded to a Watchdog.org request for comment.

Domina also addressed rumors he plans to put $5 million to $10 million of his own money into his campaign. J.L. Spray, chairman of the Nebraska Republican Party, mentioned the rumor during a debate with the chairman of the Democratic Party earlier this week before the Lincoln Independent Business Association.

When asked about it, Domina’s campaign told Nebraska Watchdog he would prefer to address the rumor at LIBA. Then on Thursday, he went on KFOR to address the issue, saying he prefers to address rumors in person and requested an opportunity to do so at a future LIBA meeting where “Spray is invited to attend.”

“I don’t think Mr. Spray knows Mrs. Domina and if he did I don’t think he’d repeat those kind of rumors,” he said with a laugh on KFOR. “From the beginning it’s been my position that the Senate seat is not for sale. And that means that no candidate can buy it, no third-party investor from outside or within the state can buy it. It’s up to the people of Nebraska to choose that candidate.”

That appeared to be a thinly veiled criticism of Sasse, who has raised 69 percent of his campaign funds from outside Nebraska, but often responds to the criticism by noting he has 11 times as many Nebraska donors as the other three candidates combined.

A prominent trial lawyer, Domina is certainly capable of bankrolling his campaign. He’s worth between $20 million and $82 million, according to the financial disclosure forms he submitted to the secretary of the U.S. Senate, as Nebraska Watchdog reported last month.

He acknowledged he has loaned his campaign $300,000 so far, saying he had to because he was a relative unknown when he launched his campaign. He said he “hates asking” people for money and would rather “communicate messages” more cheaply — through radio shows, for example.

Domina said he doesn’t think it takes $5 million to $10 million to run an intelligent campaign unless you’re using “D.C. consultants… and I’m not doing that.”

The four candidates face off in the Nov. 4 election.

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