Check with Schmit-Albin if you want to win

But the most powerful thing she and the organization she leads do is give or hold back endorsements to political candidates. “Anyone who runs for public office without touching base with her does so at their peril,” says W. Don Nelson, former state director for Sen. Ben Nelson and publisher of “Prairie Fire,” a monthly regional journal of public policy and the arts. 

Others say any Republican who wants to run for office in this state has to have the blessing of the National Rifle Association, the Nebraska Farm Bureau and Nebraska Right to Life.

Schmit-Albin was a junior in high school when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade in 1973, the ruling that said most federal and state restrictions on abortion violated a constitutional right to privacy.

Eight years later, she attended her first Walk for Life, and the next year she started the Nance County Right to Life organization.

For the past 18 years, she has run Nebraska Right to Life. She also serves on the National Right to Life board.

Schmit-Albin is the daughter of  former state Sen. Loran Schmit and one of 10 children. That, she says, has given her “pretty good resilience.” 

She may well be the only woman in the state with an army; she claims 58,000 pro-life households in the state.

Before elections, her all-volunteer army plants literature on thousands of car windshields in hundreds of church parking lots.

Her organization produces and distributes 95,000 voter guides during primary elections. She also leads the group’s political action committee.

That PAC, she says, has taken quite a bit of heat — especially in the last election — for sticking to its policy of giving a sole endorsement to an incumbent who has kept a promise to vote pro-life.

“It’s caused a lot of consternation in the state,” Schmit-Albin says. “We’ve created enemies. But people understand our PAC has integrity.”

But even though she and her group wield a mighty influence, she says, “power is nothing I really think about.”