North Platte Telegraph – Macey Budke joins Huebner as North Platte opponents to Smith
Todd von Kampen Feb 16, 2026
After going more than 25 years without fielding a candidate for Congress, North Platte now has two.
Macey (Story) Budke, practice manager for the Psychiatric Hope clinic at 321 E. Third St., announced Saturday she’ll circulate petitions to run as an independent candidate for the 3rd Congressional District seat held for 20 years by Rep. Adrian Smith of Gering. “Our communities are facing hospital closures, workforce shortages and economic uncertainty,” she said in a press release. “We need practical solutions, honest accountability and leadership grounded in the people — not political loyalty.” Budke joins Mark Cohen of Lemoyne, also making an independent bid, and Smith’s May 12 Republican primary challenger David Huebner of rural North Platte as west central Nebraskans seeking to derail Smith’s re- election bid.
Becky Kelly Stille of South Sioux City is the only official candidate in the 3rd District’s Democratic primary. Partisan challengers have until March 2 to file. Neither Budke nor Cohen, should one or both succeed in their petition quests, would appear on 3rd District ballots until the Nov. 3 general election. Both will have until 5 p.m. CT Aug. 3 to file filled-out petitions at Secretary of State Bob Evnen’s State Capitol office in Lincoln. Each will need verified signatures from at least 20% of registered 3rd District voters who cast ballots for president in November 2024.
In a Monday interview with The Telegraph, Budke, 35, said she has lived in the region most of her life but returned to North Platte five years ago. She and her husband, Ethan, lived from 2015 to 2021 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where her parents, John and Janelle Story, now live. Their 6-year-old son, Austin, was born there. Ethan Budke is an electronics supervisor for the Nebraska Department of Transportation’s District 6 office in North Platte. His father, Kevin, is a brother of longtime Budke PowerSports owner Steve Budke of North Platte. Macey Budke said she grew up on ranches where John Story was a cowhand, first in Logan County on Wild Horse Creek north of Stapleton and then on Pawnee Springs Ranch between North Platte and Maxwell. Her mother has been a nurse for more than 20 years. Budke graduated from North Platte High School in 2009, four years after Huebner. She studied to be a registered nurse at North Platte Community College until injuring her back in 2015 while working as a certified nursing assistant at a North Platte nursing home. She adjusted her professional course after her husband transferred to Cheyenne with the Union Pacific Railroad later that year, she said.
While working at other health-related jobs, she received an associate’s degree in psychology from Laramie County Community College in 2016 and a bachelor’s in psychology from the University of Wyoming a year later. Two master’s degrees, both earned online, followed in 2020 and 2024 from Nebraska’s Bellevue University. The first was in industrial organizational psychology and the second in health care administration. After returning to North Platte, “I was just trying to figure out which route I was wanting to go,” Budke said. She worked for a time at Guardian Life Family Services before joining Psychiatric Hope three years ago,
advancing there from a medical scribe’s job into her current role. “I’ve found my niche,” she said.
Budke traced her interest in running for Congress to her agricultural background, her studies in rural health care and her family’s educational challenges raising Austin, who has been diagnosed on the autism spectrum. She began sending letters on her various interests to Rep. Smith’s office as well as those of U.S. Sens. Deb Fischer and Pete Ricketts. “I didn’t receive as many responses as I would have liked,” Budke said. She concluded that serving in Congress has become “more of a career” in which “politicians will either align their votes with what their party is telling them to do or what the corporate donor interest is or lobbyist interest (is), and that just seems wrong to me.”
If she succeeds in making the ballot and then being elected, she will focus on ag, health care and education issues and being accountable to her greater Nebraska constituents, she said. Federal budget cuts are only increasing the challenges of serving rural Nebraskans and keeping them in the state, Budke said. She criticized President Donald Trump’s Feb. 6 executive order increasing U.S. beef imports from Argentina. “Our administration says America first,” she said. “OK, fine. Are the policies and our approaches aligning with that pronounced thought process?” Budke said “I have always been pro-choice” on abortion, though she added that she can live with the ban after 12 weeks’ gestation that voters put into the Nebraska Constitution in 2024.
“I’m comfortable enough with it because it is within the first trimester, and typically people would be able to find out” if they’re pregnant, she said. Budke said she’s aware of questions raised about nonpartisanship regarding two-time Senate candidate Dan Osborn of Omaha. He ran as an independent in 2024 and is doing so again this year, though the Nebraska Democratic Party has endorsed his race against Ricketts. “I will admit that I worked a bit” with the Lincoln County Democrats’ “action committee,” Budke said. But she quit after deciding “my values aligned more with not being beholden to either party.” But she said she expects she will caucus with one major party or the other if elected. Which one she chooses would depend on the committee assignments she might be offered, she added. “I don’t think that would be beneficial or make much impact to say at the federal level I wouldn’t caucus” with either party, Budke said. “That’s just not realistic.”
In local election filings late last week:
• Challenger Tyler Volkmer joined incumbents Ryan Stearns and Necole Miller in the race for three Brady school board seats. Sara Gentry, the other incumbent, has until 5 p.m. Tuesday to file for re-election if she intends to before the state filing deadline for May 12 primary offices.
• Wellfleet Village Board incumbent Megan Schroeder has filed for re-election, though village filing deadlines are July 15 for incumbents and Aug. 3 for others. Challenger Laurie Viter became the first candidate for two Brady Village Board seats.
