FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM and Caesars have partnered with Ho-Chunk to commission a public opinion poll gauging Nebraskans' interest in a potential amendment to the state's constitution that would allow bettors in the state to place sports bets online.

Lance Morgan — the CEO of Ho-Chunk, the parent company of WarHorse Gaming, which operates physical sportsbooks in Lincoln and Omaha — confirmed Wednesday that his company and its partners are behind the poll, which began circulating Monday and will wrap up this week.

For now, gamblers in Nebraska can only place sports bets in person at casinos that have sports betting operations — which currently includes the WarHorse operations in Lincoln and Omaha and the Grand Island Casino Resort. But the gambling industry is mulling a bid to change that through an amendment on November's ballot, assuming this week's poll signals support for such a change.

“We don’t want to do anything until we see what happens," Morgan told the Journal Star, acknowledging that WarHorse and its allies "have big plans" that could only move forward with the public's support.

He couldn't offer early polling results Wednesday, but said anecdotally "it's something people want," noting that WarHorse staff are asked about online sports gambling "constantly" at their physical sportsbooks. 

"Sports betting has become legal, and if you're gonna do it, people really — they don't want to drive if they can help it," he said. "They'd much rather do it from their phone. It’s a natural sort of expansion."

Morgan suggested he would rather avoid a costly petition drive to get the issue before voters in November and instead hopes Nebraska lawmakers, after assessing the outcome of the poll, will pass a legislative resolution to put the constitutional amendment to votes this fall.

“If the people want it, they work for the people," he said.

But such an outcome is unlikely — particularly since lawmakers' window to introduce new legislation this year already ended, meaning the conservative-dominated Legislature would have to suspend its own rules to take up the issue this year.

The more likely path for online sports gambling to reach November's ballot is through a petition drive. Sponsors would have to gather roughly 122,000 valid signatures — including 5% of registered voters in at least 38 counties — by July 2024 to get the issue onto the 2024 general election ballot.

That route would be costly. Other petition drives in recent years have required $1 million or more to hire paid circulators to crisscross the state. And the successful 2020 bid to legalize casino gambling in Nebraska generated more than $7 million in spending by pro- and anti-gambling forces on advertisements, lawyers and petition circulators.

And any such petition drive wouldn't be without opponents in a state that repeatedly rejected legalized casino sports gambling before voters approved a trio of ballot initiatives aimed at allowing casino gambling at six licensed horse racetracks across the state in 2020.

"Sports betting is just atrocious," said Pat Loontjer, the executive director of Gambling With the Good Life who has fought against gambling's expansion in Nebraska for nearly three decades.

"You can sit on the phone and lose your home," she said Wednesday. "So we would definitely be opposed to it."

Casey Ricketts, the interim executive director of Nebraska's Racing and Gaming Commission, said Wednesday that the commission has no formal opinion on the potential legalization of online sports gambling, but said the commission's staff has "been actively learning and preparing” for its arrival in Nebraska. 

The potential petition drive to legalize online sports gambling in the state would mark the latest effort to rapidly expand legalized gambling in Nebraska and beyond.

Betting on live sports was illegal in most of the United States as recently as 2018, when the Supreme Court cleared the way for states to legalize wagers on live games. In the years since, 38 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized some form of sports betting, while other states have mulled legislation to follow suit.

Online sports betting is legal in four states that border Nebraska: Iowa, Kansas, Colorado and Wyoming.

Sports wagering was included in the three constitutional amendments overwhelmingly approved by Nebraska voters in 2020 to establish casino gambling at the state's licensed horse racing tracks.

But since online gambling wasn't included in those amendments, would-be sports gamblers couldn't place sports bets in Nebraska until racetrack casinos were approved by the Racing and Gaming Commission.

WarHorse Lincoln, Nebraska's first state-licensed casino, received commission approval and opened its doors in September 2022. The casino's sportsbook didn't open for another nine months, accepting its first bet in June 2023.

State law still prohibits betting on home games of Nebraska college teams.

Sen. Eliot Bostar introduced a bill (LB168) last year to change that — encountering opposition from gambling opponents including former Husker football coach Tom Osborne — but the Legislature's General Affairs Committee hasn't advanced it to be considered by the full body.

Still, the prohibition on online sports gambling in Nebraska hasn't stopped state residents from doing it. 

Geolocation analysis conducted last year identified 64,000 mobile sports-betting user accounts in Nebraska, belonging to at least some users who are crossing the state's eastern border to Iowa to place online sports bets. 

The analysis identified 7,804 border crossings between Sept. 7, when the NFL season kicked off, and Oct. 30 last year, the Omaha World-Herald reported.

In 2022, in-person gamblers spent $232 million in Iowa, while bets made online totaled $2.12 billion — nine times as much.

In 2023, Nebraska's casinos brought in $89 million — only $1.3 million of which came from sports betting.

Morgan, Ho-Chunk's CEO, says the company and its partners predict online sports gambling would be a $1.5 billion industry annually in Nebraska, 20% of which would be diverted to the state under the language proposed in this week's poll.

Bostar, who sponsored the Legislature's latest effort to tweak the state's sports gambling law, said Wednesday that he had brought LB168 because of the inconsistencies in the state's laws — not because he has a particular interest in the expansion of sports gambling in Nebraska.

But, without having personally reviewed Ho-Chunk's poll, he made some of the same arguments the casino industry's bid to legalize online sports betting might hinge on.

"I think there are valid concerns that people have around gambling," he said. "However, a lot of Nebraskans are already participating in sports betting, and they are participating in sports betting contrary to the current laws of the state.

"And the question we need to ask ourselves is whether or not we want that revenue to be utilized in Nebraska, or do we want it to continue to go to Iowa?"