Dan Osborn, the Independent Senate Candidate Who Could Tip Nebraska

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3:07This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When you look at the current makeup of Congress, and the Senate in particular, Democrats have got a big numbers problem. For a generation or more, they've been concentrating in big urban areas, leaving more rural states trending heavily Republican. Now, we often hear that Democrats are fighting to be competitive in parts of the country where they've already been counted out. But that's easier said than done. With partisanship so high in the country, that means winning over voters who are not just skeptical, but hostile. Right now, it's a government for the 1 % and the corporations.

3:48And I think we're fed up.

3:53Dan Osborne of Nebraska would probably be a dream candidate for the Democrats. He's a blue-collar mechanic in the food processing industry. He's a union leader, an economic populist, and a veteran of the Navy and the Army National Guard. But Osborne isn't a Democrat. And he doesn't want to associate with either party. He's running as an independent. which is not an easy choice for him because it makes fundraising and generally running a campaign a great deal harder. And yet polls are showing that Dan Osborne is running neck and neck with Pete Ricketts, the Republican incumbent in a very Republican state.

4:29The Democratic nominee in the race just stepped aside to clear the field for Osborne. I sat down with Dan Osborne recently to talk about the Senate and his race and how he got into politics in the first place.

4:47Dan, some people know your story well, particularly if they're in Nebraska, but you're about to run for Senate. And I just wonder how you got into politics. You're a union guy. I'd love to know your working history and how you decided to make this leap. Yeah. Well, if you don't mind, I would like to go back to graduating high school. Okay. Because I went into the Navy. I've always felt compelled to serve. I then met my wife. We had our first daughter. And, you know, my life changed. And I was like, man, I need a job with some insurance. It's easy to take care of yourself, but as soon as you have to start taking care of somebody else.

5:28So I went into the workforce, dropped out of college, and started working at Kellogg's as an industrial mechanic. One of the first days on the job, an old guy by the name of Ron Jabowski, an old Polish guy. He looked like Tom Selleck from Magnum PI. I'm dating myself again. And these kids probably don't know. We'll explain. We'll have liner notes. There you go. You know, we were wrenching on a machine, and he looked over at me. He said, hey, kid, have you joined the union yet? I said, no, sir, I have not. He's like, well, you might want to think about doing that. I said, well, crap, Tom Selleck's telling me to join the union.

5:59I better go do that. Nebraska's right to work. What were you making at Kellogg's at that time? At that time, I was making, this was in 2002, roughly. I was making$19 an hour. And then I joined the union. I just worked hard, and I kept my head down for a lot of years, just going to work. Well, old guys like Ron used to take care of the union business. And we started to lose on some contracts. Those guys started to retire, and so I wanted to get involved. So I ran for executive board of my local. I got elected as vice president. About three months later, the president stepped down because you get yelled at a lot in that role by both your members and management alike, but I knew the role was important, so I assumed it.

6:46When you say you lost some contracts, what does that mean? In 2015, we made a lot of concessions. It was a two-tier wage system was the massive one. That was a killer for us. So now you have somebody working right next to you making half the wages you are and a different insurance policy. So during COVID, we were all working seven days a week, 12 hours a day that whole year, no time off. In fact, at one point in time, 50 % of our workforce was forced quarantine and or sick. But we kept all four of those plants running at maximum capacity. The CEO gave himself a$2 million raise, the board enriched themselves, stock buybacks, capitalism working at its finest, got no problem with that.

7:28Problem I had was our contract expired at the end of that year. And they sat across the negotiating table from us and they said, we're going to take your health insurance, we're going to take your cost of living adjustment, our only form of wage increases designed to keep us even with inflation, and then we're going to implement a two-tier wage system that's permanent with no path for a lower-tier employee to go the upper tier. And so for me as president, that was my old crap moment. And this is really where my story begins in politics. I cut my teeth in politics on the picket line. The strike was 77 days.

8:01It's a long strike. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a long time not to get paid. Did you get popular support? We did. Yeah. I mean, Joe Biden came out and talked about our strike. Our favorability rating or union's favorability rating around the country was, you know, some of the polling data that we saw. And sentiment was about 72 % were in favor of, you know, what we were trying to do. What kind of contract did you come to? What kind of agreement? I believe it was a 3 % raise over five years. It wasn't a ton. We weren't asking for a ton. And the two-tier wage system, we were able to negotiate more lower-tier employees to go to the upper-tier yearly, and we held our insurance.

8:48Now, you ran two years ago for Senate, and you came up short. What's different about the political climate now that you think will make your candidacy more of a possibility? Fundamentally, the difference is my opponent. You know, in 2024, I ran against Deb Fisher. I had no name recognition. I mean, I took the truth that wage earning people deserve a seat at the table in Washington, D.C. Pretty simple. And I took that out. I did over 200 public town halls in Nebraska and just learned everything I know right now from people of Nebraska and their towns, from boots on the ground. And we turned that into 47 percent of the vote.

9:27Right. You came up short by six points. Six points. Even though in the same state, Trump won by 20, I think. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we did well. So that was encouraging. It was, yeah. And, you know, so fast forward to 2026 and I have to decide now, am I going to do this again? Because it's hard, right? Especially for – this is why less than 2 % of our elected officials in the House and Senate come from the working class because it's hard. I don't have a law firm that can go run itself while I go, you know, run around the state. When you say it's hard, you mean personally hard. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that.

10:03Yeah, well, I'm getting ready to remortgage my house so I can pay my bills. That's probably unique for Senate candidates. Yeah. And last Friday, I just quit my job as a pipe fitter so I can campaign full time. What does politics look like to you? When you look at the Senate, the way it's composed, what its concerns are, the language it speaks, Where do you think it's failing you? Robin Williams, the late comedian, he said it best. He said, our politicians should be wearing NASCAR jackets with patches of their sponsors so we know how they're going to vote. It's the money. The corrupting money. The corrupting money.

10:38Citizens united. Corporations are not people. Money is not free speech. You shouldn't be able to donate an unlimited amount of money to an independent expenditure. That's how Elon Musk pumped$300 million into the election. That is too much influence and control. And you can almost relate every single issue that we are going to talk about and people talk about to a money interest at some point, right? So if you want to work in Washington, D.C., and you want to continue, especially in the House where you've got to run every two years, and I was told a House member spends four hours every single day just dialing for dollars, how are you supposed to be effective?

11:16And who are you going to be working for? Are you going to be working for the people that got you elected, that voted for you, or are you going to be working for the people giving you money so you can continue to work, right? It's a dichotomy that doesn't work. But I got to ask you, how are you going to get money to run? Well, I don't take corporate PAC money. My average donation is$48, and I've received small-dollar donations from all 50 states. So my campaign is powered by the people. Why do you want to run as an independent and not either a Democrat or Republican? I've always been an independent from the time I could register to vote.

11:52I grew up in a very conservative household. My dad actually sent me trick-or-treating when I was a kid dressed as George Bush Sr. But I knew when I went off on my own into the Navy that I didn't line up with everything that he lined up with. How would you differentiate your politics from your dad's? Well, I would say that, well, first of all, where we do line up is being fiscally conservative. Wait a minute. Fiscal conservatives, though, they don't want even rich people paying all that much tax. Do you want to see that? I want to see people pay their fair share. What does that mean? Well, and here's the thing, because you look at Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and you look at their tax bracket and how much they pay, it's hardly anything.

12:34I'm not going to go into the statistics of what I owe this year, but I'm getting killed. That's one of the reasons I have to remortgage my house to pay my taxes. So on that issue – But on that issue, you sound awfully – forgive me. On that issue, you sound awfully like a populist Democrat. Where do you differentiate yourself from that side of the thing? If you want to put labels on it, we can just put labels on it. But at the end of the day, for me personally, when I earn a certain wage and I get taxed a certain percentage off that certain wage, If you're on the other end of that and you're just clicking a keyboard and you're making millions of dollars on stock buybacks and dividends, why isn't that an earning as well?

13:12And why isn't that taxed at the same rate I'm taxed at? It's just people making money regardless of whether you do it with my hands or they do it with the click of a button. To me, that's as – I mean boiled down, that's as simple as I can make it. What are the issues that you would consider yourself conservative on? Social issues? Some, I guess, but mostly it's, you know, where I would agree with Trump is I think he did a good job on the border. I think without a border, we don't have a country. The flip side of that is immigration. That's where I'm going to break from him. And especially, you know, thinking of it fiscally, we could talk about ICE and the fact that I understand and I agree with the fundamental mission of enforcement.

13:58And that's to get the criminal elements that shouldn't be here out of the country. That's to keep the people safe. And they've done this mission off of about$7 billion. So now they have, with the big, beautiful bill, they have$80 billion. Why do they need that increase to perform the exact same mission? And now we're seeing them go into the streets with their masks, and now we have American citizens dead. That's, I can't get behind that. How do you feel about the Trump presidency, the second term? I think it's playing out in real time as damaging, especially in my state. It's an agriculture state.

14:35We are second in corn. We're fifth in soybean exports, and we're first in the nation in beef. And bad policy is bad policy. And sweeping tariffs, the cutting of USAID closes markets to our bean farmers. 52 % of our exports for beans in the fifth largest bean economy in the state. That means we now have beans rotting in silos. What's that cause? Family farmers and ranchers. Bankruptcy is up 46%. Farmer suicides are on the rise. And regardless, I'm tired of people saying, oh, you voted for it. You deserve it. No, you don't, right? They're human beings, and 2 % of our population feed the rest of us.

15:24Dan Osborne, who's running as an independent for the Senate in Nebraska, will continue our conversation in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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19:44This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm talking today with an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate, Dan Osborne of Nebraska. Osborne has never held government office, but this isn't his first rodeo either. He ran for the Senate in 2024, and he lost to the incumbent Deb Fischer by seven points. In a state as solidly Republican as Nebraska, that was considered a pretty good showing. Osborne is a mechanic, and he was the president of his union local, which makes quite a contrast to his opponent, the current senator, Pete Ricketts, whose father founded TD Ameritrade. Meanwhile, President Trump has become deeply unpopular, and anti-incumbent sentiment is likely to be very high.

20:33I'll continue my conversation now with Dan Osborne. Dan, do you find a lot of people in Nebraska who voted for Trump the second time out regret that vote now? Yes. That is the sentiment in the focus groups. It's like, eh, this isn't exactly what, you know, we thought it was going to happen. So especially if you're a farmer, last year you didn't have, you couldn't sell your beans. This year you get a bailout that's falling short because the inputs are so high. fertilizer. I was talking to a row crop farmer who only farms 1 ,900 acres, so he's kind of small. $50 ,000 more is his fertilizer is going to cost than it was pre-war with Iran because of the natural gas is how we get our fertilizer, and it's stuck there.

21:20So it's jacking up prices. Their inputs are high. Now their fuel's high for their tractors, and they're hurting. How do you feel about the war in Iran? I think the war in Iran, I think this is a Trump war. You know, do I think Iran should have nuclear weapons? No. Do I think the Ayatollah was a bad guy and killed, you know, a lot of his citizens that were trying to rise up? Yeah. Do I think this could have been done diplomatically? Yeah, I do. I believe that. And, you know, it was in 2018. Yeah. Well, in 2018, we walked away from it. We walked away from it. Correct. And that makes no sense. You oppose abortion, but you've supported the Roe decision.

22:11And since Dobbs, Nebraska's passed a 12 week ban. How has that affected the state? And what would you support when it comes to reproductive rights? Yeah, I think I tend to take a bit of a libertarian stance that, you know, stay out of our bedrooms in our doctor's offices. That's not the role that Congress should have. So I would support codify and row at a federal level. In my own personal life, I'm an Irish Catholic. In my own personal life, I would never advocate for anybody to have an abortion. But I support the right for women to choose. We began our conversation by talking about your union history.

22:57You led that strike at a Kellogg's plant in Omaha in 2021. that plant is going to be fully closed by the end of the year, cutting about 500 union jobs, as I understand it. How did that happen? And what does this mean for the labor movement, that after you go on strike, you win some concessions, the company just closes up shop, and that's it? Mm-hmm. It's, well, first of all, I'm not 100 % convinced they're going to close this. they again tried this in 2015 in our contract. They said they were going to close Battle Creek, Michigan. If we didn't give them the two-tier wage system, so we gave them the two-tier wage system, they left Battle Creek open.

23:39So this could be just an employ for negotiations, but if it's not and they close that plant, well, that goes back to Kellogg's business model, right? they've sold that company to Kelanova, and I think Kelanova sold it again. They spun off North American cereal. So there's a lot of things at play behind the scenes and the fact that cereal sales are down. Just curious, why are cereal sales down? I think, I mean, there's so many other breakfast options too, and there's healthier breakfast options probably that people, and you know ever since Healthier than Frosted Flakes? Get out. Chocolate Frosted Flakes.