BEATRICE, Neb. (AP) — In the back room of a brewery in southeastern Nebraska this summer, more than three dozen people crowded together to hear Dan Osborn, a former grain factory worker and independent candidate for U.S. Senate.
The standing-room-only crowd in the tiny town of Beatrice was larger than Osborn expected, but it stood out for more than just its size. Attendees ranged from supporters of former President Donald Trump wearing “Make America Great Again” hats to voters who strongly supported Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats.
Osborn’s message to them all was that the American two-party system has failed them.
“There is no one like me in the United States Senate,” he told the crowd. “Right now the Senate is a country club of millionaires working for billionaires.”
Osborn has put together a campaign in deeply conservative Nebraska that rejects both major political parties as part of a broken system. For a man who held his first campaign news conferences in the garage of his suburban Omaha home, he surprised pundits by emerging within months as a sedate challenger to two-term Republican Sen. Deb Fischer, who was considered a unthreatening Republican seat .
The contest has attracted $21 million in donations from outside groups that benefit Osborn, and even Fischer’s campaign acknowledges that the race is closer than expected. There is no Democratic nominee, but a win for Osborn could scupper Republican plans to regain the Senate majority. Osborn has said he will not meet with either party.
That hasn’t stopped Democrats from openly supporting him. In the first 16 days of October after bursting into the national spotlight, Osborn raised more than $3 million, almost entirely from private individuals and most of it through the Democrats’ Act Blue fundraising site, according to reports from the Federal Election Commission shows. That was nearly six times the $530,000 Fischer had raised.
Osborn raised a total of nearly $8 million, Fischer had $6.5 million, and just three weeks before the election he had $1.1 million in cash, twice as much as Fischer.
Osborn has succeeded not only by rejecting political parties, but also by campaigning locally across the state, aided by clever ads — in one he notes, “I don’t even own a suit” — that contrast his working-class roots with a system in which, in his opinion, politicians are “bought and sold”.
Osborn is a U.S. Navy and Nebraska Army National Guard veteran and industrial mechanic who gained national recognition three years ago when he successfully led a labor strike at Kellogg’s grain plants, winning higher wages and other benefits. This background shapes his view that working families are being overwhelmed by a growing wealth gap, he says.
An Osborn victory would be a huge upset in a state where Republicans hold every statewide office and every congressional district.
Fischer is a rancher from Valentine, a town of 2,600 in northern Nebraska about 300 miles (483 kilometers) northwest of Omaha. She was a little-known state representative when she ran as an underdog in 2012, winning a competitive primary and then defeating Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic governor and U.S. senator. Her campaign ads this year showed her leaning on fence posts and called her “sharp as barbed wire, harder than a cedar fence post.”
“Nebraskans support me because I have delivered results,” Fischer said this week, citing national defense and road projects as areas where she has done the right thing in her state. “I have a long conservative track record that helped build Nebraska and keep America strong.”
Fischer’s pollster John Rogers of Torchlight Strategies, a longtime national Republican Party official, recently argued that the apparent closeness of the race is a “mirage.” Her campaign assumes that Osborn cannot build a sufficient lead in the Democratic areas of Omaha, the state’s largest city, to surpass the votes Fischer will win in the expansive rural areas.
The pollster also predicted that Trump’s support of Fischer in September will pull Nebraska voters back into their corner in a state where he is expected to win by a vast margin. “She won’t let you down!” Trump posted on his social media page Truth.
Trump called Osborn a “radical leftist” and compared him to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is running as an independent but has aligned himself with Democrats and become a leading liberal spokesman. Fischer and her supporters reinforce this message.
Still, Osborn has drawn national attention, complicating Republican ambitions and raising calls for a dismantling of the country’s two-party system. This has broad appeal at a time when antipathy towards politics is growing.
“At least as an independent, you’re an open book,” said Jim Jonas, who led Greg Orman’s high-profile campaign for independent U.S. Senate in neighboring Kansas a decade ago. “You have the opportunity to frame yourself, shape the race and run as a refreshing, different choice instead of the two broken parties.”
That’s exactly how Osborn presents himself.
“Congress is a complete misrepresentation of the demographics of our voters,” he told the crowd in Beatrice. “Less than 2% of our elected officials in both the House and Senate are working class.”
Osborn has received donations from political action committees that support independents, such as the Wyoming-based Way Back PAC, as well as groups that support Democratic candidates.
Its independence has not prevented immigration from becoming a key issue, as it is across the country. Osborn said the US border with Mexico is too porous. But he also says he supports a form of amnesty for immigrants who have been in the US illegally for a long time, as long as they work and have not committed violent crimes.
Like Orman in 2014, Osborn supports abortion rights. That could assist him after the Supreme Court’s decision to repeal the constitutional right to abortion. Voters in seven states, including some conservative ones, have either protected abortion rights or rejected attempts to restrict them in statewide votes over the past two years. Fischer has maintained that Osborn will not support any restrictions.
But the core of Osborn’s appeal to his supporters seems to be that he is a working-class everyman.
He receives support from at least a dozen unions. Two weeks before the election, the national AFL-CIO brought top officials to Omaha to lead a phone bank in support of Osborn. About 30 union members and officials – including AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler – used the phones to drum up support and donations for Osborn.
“His message of supporting working families really resonates with people,” Shuler said.
As she spoke, volunteers at a nearby phone bank called for donations of up to $3,000 and modern pledges of support from Nebraskans who called her.
“People are so cynical about politics now,” Shuler said. “And he resonates with those people because he’s one of them.”
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Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas.
