Two of the biggest names in American sports betting have spent the fall pouring money into a state where neither can legally take a bet on a phone. According to reports Monday, both DraftKings and FanDuel chipped in roughly $10.4 million each to the Tax Relief Nebraska campaign by late October.
Their combined $20.8 million made up more than 90% of the nearly $22.5 million the committee raised before Tuesday’s vote on mobile sports betting.
Twenty million dollars sounds steep for one ballot question in a state of about 2 million people, until you see the market behind it. A study backed by the campaign projects that over the next five years, online sportsbooks will pocket over $640 million from local bettors even after paying out the winners. The state would collect $86.9 million in taxes, with $60.9 million going to property tax relief.
Voters, in other words, are weighing a trade, and they have to say yes twice. It’s a two-part package (Initiative 440 changes the constitution to clear the way for online bets, while Initiative 441 writes the rulebook). If both pass, sports betting will leap straight from racetrack casinos onto phones across the state. Still, the resulting tax revenue will barely scratch the surface of Nebraska's massive property tax bill.
Two companies are paying for almost all of it
The checks got bigger as Election Day got closer. By late September, the committee had hauled in $14.65 million, adding another $8 million over the next month. While DraftKings and FanDuel led the charge, operators like Fanatics and BetMGM pitched in with smaller checks too.
On the other side, the opposition group, backed by the Nebraska Family Alliance, is running a much leaner campaign. Their late-September filings showed just about $1 million, all coming from a single nonprofit.
The pro-betting money has also reached a legislative race. The money trail even shook up a local legislative race. On Oct. 27, the pro-betting campaign poured $750,000 into ads for Sutton
Mayor Tim Anderson. The move immediately backfired on Anderson, costing him the backing of three major state officials, including U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts.
From casino counters to phones across the state
Voters approved racetrack casinos in 2020 by roughly 65% to 35%, and sportsbooks opened in 2023, though only at counters and kiosks inside those casinos. State lawmakers tried to greenlight mobile betting in 2025, but Senator Eliot Bostar’s push was choked out by a filibuster. By April 2026, the legislature shelved the bill entirely. By then, casino operators and sportsbook companies had gone back to the drawing board and backed the citizen petitions now on the ballot.
Under the proposed measures, each of the state's racetrack casinos could launch up to two betting apps, meaning Nebraskans could see up to 12 different options statewide. To place a bet, users must physically be within state lines, pulling data from servers housed locally. On the business side, these apps would face the same 20% revenue tax currently levied on brick-and-mortar casinos.
For the sportsbooks, that turns a few casino counters into a statewide storefront that fits in a pocket, and the partnerships are taking shape. Take WarHorse, for instance, which operates casinos in Lincoln and Omaha: they've already locked in deals with heavyweights like FanDuel, DraftKings, and MGM to roll out platforms the moment voters give the green light.
The customers are waiting at the Iowa line
A mobile market pays off only if people use it, and Nebraska's appetite is no secret. Lindsay Slader of GeoComply, which sportsbooks use to verify a customer's location, told lawmakers in March 2025 that the company logged 3.9 million attempts to reach regulated sportsbooks from inside Nebraska during the 2024-25 football season. That traffic came from roughly 83,000 eager users. Even more telling, GeoComply tracked 42,000 instances of residents physically crossing state lines to bet (with a staggering 92% of them heading straight into Iowa).
For DraftKings and FanDuel, those bettors are low-hanging fruit. They know the apps and have shown they will drive to Iowa to use them. Jordan McGrain, a sponsor of Tax Relief Nebraska, sees the same traffic as revenue walking out the door. “Without legalizing and regulating the marketplace, we just get the status quo,” he told the Examiner in late October.
The fine print behind the property tax pitch
The campaign put its main argument in its name. Nebraska taxes gaming revenue at 20% and funnels 70% of those tax dollars directly into property tax relief, splits the remainder among local host communities, and intends to replicate that exact blueprint for mobile betting.
But the 20% headline hides some fine print. In Nebraska, the taxable revenue is calculated only after subtracting federal fees and those promotional free bets operators hand out to hook players, and sportsbooks hand out free bets heavily when a market opens. A 20% tax on the forecast’s full $640.9 million would raise about $128 million. Instead, industry analysts project closer to $87 million, revealing that the campaign quietly expects promotional deductions to wipe out a full third of the taxable pie.
Then comes the bill the campaign promises to ease. Local governments levied $5.59 billion in property taxes in 2025, state records show. When you look at the big picture, the projected $12.2 million in annual relief amounts to a mere drop in the bucket, accounting for just about 0.22% of the state's total property tax bill campaign's separate 10-year claim of more than $166 million works out to about 0.3%. Critics say neither number moves the needle.
State Treasurer Joey Spellerberg and State Auditor Mike Foley take it a step further. In a campaign ad funded by Spellerberg, the duo bluntly accuses the betting industry of outright lying about the promised tax relief.
Supporters answer that little money is still real money for taxpayers. Back in July, when the campaign submitted its petitions, McNally pointed to Nebraska's five existing casinos as proof of concept. Those venues generated upwards of $52 million in gaming taxes in 2025, about $36.6 million of it for property tax credits. “If that's not property tax relief, I don't know what is,” she said.
Even so, State Senator Mike Jacobson, a bank executive from North Platte, broke the numbers down for his constituents in a late October column. His conclusion? Mobile betting would only offset about three-tenths of one percent of the state's total property tax bill.
The revenue still has value, he wrote, but it “does put the headline number into perspective.” He added that mobile betting won't solve Nebraska’s property tax problem.
Missouri shows why operators spend before launch
Nebraska's neighbor to the southeast already ran this exact playbook. During Missouri's legalization push, DraftKings and FanDuel poured a massive $20 million each into the campaign trail. In the first two months after mobile betting launched there in December 2025, the pair handled 73% of the $928 million wagered and won about $120 million before expenses, triple their campaign spending, the Missouri Independent reported. Thanks to aggressive promotional deductions and early launch costs, both giants completely erased their taxable winnings, leaving Missouri with zero tax revenue beyond basic licensing fees.
While Nebraska has its own distinct tax structure, Missouri's numbers reveal the bigger picture: a $20 million betting campaign is chump change to a corporation eyeing total dominance in a brand-new market.
Opponents say the phone is the problem
The convenience that makes the business attractive is what worries critics most. On Oct. 21, Save Nebraska Sports released a letter from 45 current and former Huskers athletes and coaches, led by Tom Osborne, the coach behind three national titles. “They see our state as another market and every phone as another casino,” it says of the betting companies.
Senator Jacobson, whose critical holdout vote effectively sustained the 2025 filibuster, echoes that exact concern. In his view, driving to a physical location to place a single wager is vastly different from sitting on a couch and endlessly betting on every play.
McGrain counters that state law protects players, and it does fence off Nebraska's college teams by banning bets on their in-state games, along with player props and in-game wagers on any game they play. Neither side disputes that mobile apps will make wagering completely frictionless. The real battle is over whether that convenience should be treated as a taxable goldmine or a dangerous threat.
A ‘Yes’ only starts with the regulatory clock
For all the money, nobody has a clean read on voters. With Ballotpedia listing zero public polling on either measure, onlookers are treating prediction markets like Kalshi as the unofficial scoreboard. According to Covers, traders gave the amendment a 69% chance of passing on October 28, though trading volume remained thin. By Monday, those odds cooled slightly to 59%, while the companion measure outlining the rules held stronger at around 68%.
Even if voters say yes, clearing the political hurdle is only half the battle; the real business logjam comes next. Nobody can get the ball rolling on a legal Nebraska betting app until the Racing and Gaming Commission writes the rules, and regulators have until June 1, 2027, to draft them. That leaves the industry facing a long regulatory waiting game, with no hard launch date in sight.