This week’s dramatic new terrorism threat may help remind voters Republicans have provided “strong leadership on that issue that won’t vacillate,” Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said Friday.

“People will focus on that issue this November,” Thune said in a telephone interview from Grand Island.

“People recognize we’ve gone through the last five years without a major incident. It will be in the fabric of this fall’s elections.”

Thune, who achieved GOP star status in 2004 when he defeated Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, was in Nebraska to address a $100-per-person fund-raising reception for Republican Senate nominee Pete Ricketts.  

The event at Grand Island’s Saddle Club raised an estimated $12,000 to $14,000 for the Ricketts campaign.

Steadfast Republican leadership  contrasts with “so much ambiguity and confusion on the Democratic side as to how to contend with the terrorist threat,” Thune said.

The war in Iraq is an issue Republicans need to frame within the context of the war against terror, he said.

“If we allow Democrats to talk about Iraq in isolation, that may work to the Democrats’ benefit” in the autumn election, Thune said.

“I think most people see the connection between Iraq and Lebanon and al-Qaida and this week’s attempted plot as all part of the global war on terror.”

Most Americans want to “focus on completing the mission in Iraq as part of winning the war on terror,” the senator said.

The plot uncovered by British intelligence to blow up airliners bound for the United States once again places the terrorism issue “at the top of people’s minds,” he said.

Ricketts’ contest with Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson this fall “could very well determine control of the U.S. Senate,” Thune said.

Granted, he said, it’s unlikely Republicans would experience a net loss of six Senate seats in November.

“But anything is a possibility and we always have to contend for every seat.”

Nebraska, he said, should provide “good terrain” for a Republican  pickup.

Reach Don Walton at 473-7248 or at dwalton@journalstar.com.