The crowd of 1,400 people gathered on Saturday at an outdoor amphitheater in Omaha was waiting for Tim Walz, the jocular Minnesota governor running for vice president. But it was another Democrat looking to make history who drew the first standing ovation of the evening.
“Tony, Tony, Tony,” the audience erupted as Tony Vargas, a state senator, stood at the lectern. .
“You really know how to make someone feel very, very welcome,” he said.
Mr. Vargas, 40, is vying to become the first Latino to represent Nebraska in Congress, and he has become one of the most notable Democratic candidates on the rise as he competes in a heated House race at the center of national attention.
In 2022, when Mr. Vargas first challenged Representative Don Bacon, a Republican, he lost by less than three percentage points, not even 6,000 votes. Now, their rematch is taking place in the middle of a tightly contested presidential election, and Mr. Bacon’s 2nd District appears to be swinging in Vice President Kamala Harris’s direction, bringing headwinds for Democratic candidates down the ballot like Mr. Vargas.
Nebraska is solidly Republican, but the 2nd District, which encompasses Omaha and is known as Nebraska’s blue dot, is a swing region that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020. Biden won with 56.4 percent of the vote.
A coveted victory there could help sway control of Congress, as well as decide the next president. Nebraska is one of two states (along with Maine) that award an electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district. That vote could be of such national consequence this year that Republican allies of former President Donald J. Trump in the Nebraska Legislature have been unsuccessfully pushing to change how it is awarded.
Omaha Democrats have been showing their support for the Harris-Walz ticket with campaign signs in their yards emblazoned with a single blue dot.
As Mr. Vargas helped open for Mr. Walz on Saturday, two surrogates for Mr. Trump’s campaign — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the onetime presidential candidate, and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii — were making their own appearances at a downtown Omaha hotel.
Mr. Bacon could not immediately be reached for comment on Sunday.
On Saturday, Mr. Vargas joined Mr. Walz onstage, casting Mr. Trump as a dangerous and divisive force in American politics and urging Democrats to head to the polls “to rebuild democracy.”
In an interview earlier at the amphitheater, Mr. Vargas said his team had knocked on more doors than they had at the same point in the last election, and that his campaign was drawing energy from a broader array of voters, including independents and Republicans. He said his closing pitch was a call to boot out Mr. Trump’s Republican “extremists and enablers.”
“Congress can’t get anything done,” he said. “We need a Congress that can actually focus on working-class, middle-class issues.”
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