Nebraska State Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh (D) built her name on confrontation.
In 2023, she filibustered restrictions on transgender procedures for minors, pulled national media, led chants in the Capitol rotunda, and then rolled that attention into a political action committee. “Don’t Legislate Hate” PAC was pitched as the next step. Turn the moment into muscle. Fight “400+ anti-LGBTQ bills.” Keep the energy going.
That was the promise.
Then you look at the filings.
“A political action committee launched in 2023 by a trio of progressive state senators amid their unsuccessful fight to block a law restricting transgender treatments for minors is not living up to its early hype, reporting less than $1,000 in donations last year and having failed in 2024 to defeat the one candidate it spent ad money against.”
In 2023, the PAC raised just under $125,000. In 2024, that dropped to roughly $42,000. In 2025, it raised $748.
Seven hundred forty-eight dollars. That’s the number.
Six figures to three digits in two cycles. You don’t need spin to explain that. Donors don’t leave that fast if everything is humming along.
And the spending doesn’t suggest a well-oiled machine either.
“Of the just $2,791.75 in expenditures made in 2025, there were no monies disbursed to candidates or campaigns outside of Nebraska, and the lion’s share of expenses, $2,500, was paid out to the PAC’s treasurer for ‘campaign filings.’”
So most of last year’s money went to paperwork.
Over the past three years, since its founding, most expenditures have been for consulting and administrative costs, according to filings with the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission. In 2024, the PAC spent $5,000 on digital advertising in a state legislative race. The candidate it backed lost.
And this isn’t happening in a vacuum. Since that 2023 moment, Cavanaugh has kept choosing confrontation. Most recently, she removed a historical exhibit from the Capitol, touching off statewide backlash and a public rebuke from Republican Gov. Jim Pillen. That followed the earlier Capitol clashes during the transgender debate, when protests spilled into the building and law enforcement had to step in.
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Those moments grab attention. They always do. But attention isn’t organization. It doesn’t fix fundraising. It doesn’t build staying power. If anything, it adds to the sense that the strategy is escalation first and structure later, and the “later” never really arrives.
That’s not national infrastructure. That’s not sustained influence. That’s a flash point that never turned into anything durable.
You can draw your own conclusions about the politics. The financial story is simpler. A PAC that launched with national media buzz now struggles to raise enough to cover its own filings. The fundraising cratered. The overhead stayed. The results were thin.
At some point, the filings speak for themselves. The hype was loud. The money is gone. What’s left is the record.
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