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The first person I met at a Monday night meet-and-greet for Dan Osborn, the independent Nebraska Senate candidate, was a Donald Trump-voting Republican named Joe Hallett. He’d worked, alongside his wife, Sherri, with Osborn at Omaha’s Kellogg plant. Explaining Osborn’s appeal, Joe said, “He’s not a millionaire or anything like that.” Sherri added: “He works hard. We did the same thing.”
Neither was a fan of Osborn’s opponent, the Republican senator Deb Fischer. “We were never impressed with her because she was never personable,” said Sherri. “She was never around.”
Osborn, by contrast, has been around a lot. The Monday event, at a cider house in Ashland, a town about 30 miles from Omaha, was one of more than 170 he’s done all over the state. It drew a few dozen people — more Democrats and independents than Republicans — and Osborn stayed to talk and shake hands until the place closed. Afterward, I went with him to a nearby bar to talk about his surprisingly competitive race against Fischer, which has become an unexpected problem for Republicans as they seek to retake the Senate.
As we walked, a young opposition researcher who tracks Osborn at most of his events shouted questions about which presidential candidate he’d voted for in 2020, hoping to catch him on camera saying something damaging. Osborn refused to answer, just as he won’t say whom he’ll vote for in November, insisting that the heat of partisan politics makes substantive discussion of the issues impossible. When I asked him to name a politician in Washington he hoped to work with, he said he hadn’t given the matter much thought.
The bar, with its brown walls, dropped ceiling and fluorescent overhead lights, was the apotheosis of Midwestern drab. Osborn, a tattooed Navy veteran and former union leader with a short gray beard, declared it his kind of place. As he nursed a Busch Light, I sensed he was eager to finish our interview and join Joe Hallett, who was waiting to catch up with him. But when I mentioned a book I’d heard Osborn talk about, “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy,” by the progressive writer Matt Stoller, he seemed to perk up.
“What that book taught me was this is not a new idea what we’re doing here,” he said of his campaign, which is focused on the predations of concentrated wealth. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, he said, corporations have sought to buy more and more political power, and though they succeed for a time, people eventually revolt. “I think that’s where we’re at right now,” said Osborn. “We’re at the apex of a corporate-run government.”
At such moments, he said, people’s frustrations inevitably reach a boiling point. “So they start electing a different government, a more populist message, because they know that their lives are getting harder and their government is not working for them.”
The word “populist,” as it happens, is tied up with Nebraska political history. It was coined to describe members of the People’s Party, which held its first convention in Omaha in 1892, seeking to represent farmers and laborers against what it called the “power and plunder” of the two major parties. “I have read about the prairie populism, and I hope we can emulate that,” said Osborn.
Osborn is still an underdog, but his mix of leftish economics and deep anti-elitism has already shaken up politics in bright-red Nebraska, making the Senate race far closer than almost anyone predicted. The Cook Political Report initially considered the seat “Solid Republican,” but in late September it changed its forecast to “Likely Republican.” The day I met Osborn, Cook shifted its rating another tick in Osborn’s direction, to “Lean” Republican.
Though both the Fischer and Osborn camps have released internal surveys with their candidates leading, there have been only a couple of nonpartisan polls, the most recent of which showed Osborn up by 5 points. That was in early October, and it’s entirely possible that it doesn’t capture the current state of the race. But the G.O.P. is clearly concerned; as Semafor reported this week, the Senate Republicans’ top super PAC is pouring $3 million into Nebraska to bolster Fischer in the race’s final weeks.
If Osborn wins — and maybe even if he doesn’t — his campaign will likely be seen as a model for running pro-worker candidates in places where majorities have drifted away from the Democratic Party. Democrats, like traditionally left-leaning parties across much of the developed world, have been losing working-class voters to the right, even as they attract more support from educated, cosmopolitan urbanites. Though Joe Biden has been the most pro-labor president in recent history, he’s been unable to reverse this trend.
Now Osborn’s campaign is testing a new approach to class politics. Can a message based on workers’ rights and corporate greed win over red-state voters when it’s decoupled from the cultural baggage that adheres, however unfairly, to the Democratic Party? “Ultimately I want people to see what we’ve done here, and to be able to do it in their states too,” Osborn told me.
Osborn, who spent 20 years as an industrial mechanic at Kellogg, insists he was never particularly political until 2021, when, as president of his Omaha union, he started negotiating with management over a new contract. As essential workers during the Covid pandemic, he told the crowd at the cidery, he and his members had worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, at least when they weren’t sick or stuck in quarantine. In 2020, Kellogg’s sales and profits had risen, and its chief executive’s compensation increased 20 percent to more than $11.6 million.
Osborn went into talks with management sure he and his fellow workers would “share a little sliver of the pie.” Instead, he said, Kellogg tried to cut their health benefits and cost-of-living raises, and to expand a two-tier wage system in which new employees could be paid significantly less than existing ones. “That was my ‘oh, crap’ moment,” he said.
When talks failed in October, Osborn led workers at his Omaha plant out on strike. “One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, leading 500 of my friends and their families out into the great unknown, not knowing if we were going to have a job at the end of it,” he said. It lasted 77 days and ended with most of the strikers’ demands being met.
Osborn no longer works at the plant; Kellogg fired him in 2023. The company accused him of watching Netflix on the job, but he believes it was retaliation. He retrained as a steamfitter, which was what he was doing last year when a union official named Jeff Cooley approached him about mounting an independent challenge to Fischer.
The senator, now running for her third term, had repeatedly enraged railroad workers, including by voting to thwart their ability to strike in 2022. The best way to oust her, union leaders believed, was to run an independent who could avoid getting bogged down in what Cooley called “wedge issues” that alienate social conservatives. If neither political party could come up with a viable pro-labor candidate, Cooley recalled thinking, “we’ll find our own.”
Nebraska’s Democratic Party is not pleased about the way Osborn has bypassed it. Initially, he’d sought Democratic support, hoping to build a coalition that included Libertarians and some Republicans. Then the campaign’s strategy changed, and he announced he wouldn’t accept partisan endorsements. At that point, it was too late for Democrats to field their own candidate. Partly as a result, the Nebraska Democratic Party chair, Jane Kleeb — a woman who has worked hard to rebuild the party’s neglected rural infrastructure — regards Osborn with deep distrust.
“Do I think the vast majority of Democrats are going to vote for him because they don’t like Deb Fischer?” she asked. “Yes. Do I think he has a shot? Absolutely. Do I think he’s being inauthentic? Yes. Do I worry that if he gets elected, that he’s going to be Kyrsten Sinema, the person that destroys really good bills for their own ego? Absolutely.”
But Osborn has different politics than Sinema, who regularly put the interests of her rich donors over those of her constituents. Though he insists he doesn’t plan to caucus with either the Democrats or the Republicans, he shares many key Democratic priorities. Osborn wants to raise both corporate taxes and the minimum wage. Like Biden, he champions the PRO Act, which would make it easier to organize a union. On the stump, he attacks price gouging, an issue Kamala Harris has highlighted.
Nor is he entirely at odds with the Democratic Party on social issues. He’s personally opposed to abortion, but he believes it should be legal. He’s protective of Second Amendment rights but backs the sort of regulation often supported by urban police forces.
His differences with the party often seem less about policy than about vibes. Osborn said he felt “talked down to by the Democrats,” a sentiment he believes many others share. While Republicans promise to protect people’s paychecks, “the Democrats come in and say that you need to respect people’s pronouns,” he said. “People who are working 80 hours a week in meatpacking plants or on farms or anything else — they’re not too concerned about that.”
This seems like a caricature — I can’t think of a single influential Democrat who talks about pronouns more than wages — and I can see why it would infuriate Kleeb. But ultimately, a candidate who rejects Democratic branding seems infinitely preferable to one who rejects democratic principles.
“Imagine the ramifications on American politics if Nebraska elects an independent mechanic to the halls of power,” Osborn said at the cidery. “It’s going to tell people all around the country that you don’t have to be a self-funding crypto billionaire to run for office. So nurses, teachers, plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, they can all now know that they can do the same thing.”
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