SPALDING, Neb. -- After making the long drive into the picturesque Sand Hills recently for a fundraiser held by the Keystone XL pipeline foes who hail him as their hero, state Sen. Ken Haar acknowledged that he, like Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Bob Kerrey, has something to fear from Joe Ricketts.

Haar, whose resistance to the $5.3 billion pipeline won him fans in corners of the Cornhusker State that have long leaned right, asked for help matching what could be up to $100,000 in campaign cash coming to his conservative opponent from Ricketts this fall. But while the GOP billionaire also has steered significant money to Kerrey's rival, Republican nominee Deb Fischer, the Democrats' Senate standard-bearer is hardly embracing Keystone XL as a winning issue.

Kerrey took no position on the controversial pipeline Friday, telling an audience in Lexington, Neb., that he was frustrated by Alberta-based TransCanada Corp.'s handling of eminent domain and transparency questions but declining to take a position, according to a local media report. The former senator's campaign declined to answer several requests from E&E Daily to elaborate on his Keystone XL stance.

For Kerrey, who is trailing badly to Fischer in the polls and facing an onslaught from well-funded conservative interest groups such as the pro-pipeline Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the decision to leave the Keystone XL banner on the ground may prove a pragmatic choice. Yet it puts him at odds with the Nebraska Democratic Party, which last month passed a resolution blasting TransCanada's Canada-to-U.S. oil link for crossing the state's Ogallala Aquifer.

And one of the pipeline's most visible critics -- who is co-hosting an event for Kerrey next week -- said at the recent Haar fundraiser that she hopes to make Keystone XL a flash point in his race against Fischer.

"It will piss off some folks ... but the pipeline is a huge motivator," said Bold Nebraska Executive Director Jane Kleeb, a veteran liberal organizer who made many Republican enemies by guiding ranchers and farmers in a grass-roots movement against Keystone XL.

"Could it be risky for Kerrey? Maybe," Kleeb added. "But he'd have these folks in the community standing behind him."

Although otherwise conservative Nebraskans joined Haar in fighting Keystone XL for a variety of reasons, from property rights to water quality concerns, few point to the greenhouse gas emissions generated by its Canadian oil sands crude as their main driver. Yet Kerrey is already in a bind over remarks he made in support of the Obama administration's 2009 cap-and-trade climate bill that AFP and other GOP groups are using to hammer him, leaving the door wide open for an anti-pipeline avowal.

"People who are for the pipeline, it's not going to be something they're going to vote on," Richard Witmer, an associate political science professor at Creighton University in Omaha, said in an interview. "But if they're really against the pipeline, that might be something they're going to latch on to with Kerrey as the candidate."

Kerrey's most recent series of hits at Fischer, who previously represented the Sand Hills region in the state Senate and raised early questions about Keystone XL before coming out in support of it, have run the gamut from health care to fiscal hypocrisy.

The latter attack, taken to the airwaves in a Nebraska Democratic Party TV ad this week, focuses on below-market rates Fischer's family has received for grazing its cattle on public lands. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), whom Fischer and Kerrey are vying to replace next year, offered an amendment to the recent Senate farm bill aimed at spotlighting the subsidized grazing fees that Nebraska Democrats say make Fischer a "welfare farmer" (Greenwire, June 13).

Trying to undercut Fischer's credentials as a fiscal conservative, however, may backfire with voters who see public-land stewardship as part of the rancher's code in Nebraska.

"I don't mind seeing cheaper grazing costs" on public lands, farmer and mother of two Melody Sandell said in an interview. A rancher tending to government-owned land, she added, "is caring for it as if it were his own -- and actually better, making sure there are safe water sources."

Sandell is a Republican and Keystone XL supporter who praised TransCanada for its handling of easement negotiations over part of her property that the pipeline would cross. Yet she shares something with the pipeline's conservative skeptics that Kerrey could use to his advantage: a fierce connection to the land.

Bruce Boettcher, a Republican Sand Hills cattle rancher turned dogged pipeline critic, compared his anti-XL neighbors to "the colonists" resisting their government's pressure to accept heavy Canadian crude. "What happened in 1776," he said in an interview, "that's exactly what's happening here."

Yet just because he invokes the spirit of the tea party -- and the original Boston Tea Party -- does not make Boettcher a Mitt Romney voter this fall. "I'm going to vote for [President Obama] on one issue," he said. "And that's the Keystone XL pipeline."