The Scene
No Democrat is running for U.S. Senate in Nebraska this year. The party has instead cleared a path for Dan Osborn, a mechanic who helped lead a 77-day strike for a new Kellogg’s worker contract, and then challenged Sen. Deb Fischer as an independent.
“Less than 2% of our elected officials in both the House and Senate come from the working class,” Osborn told Americana.
He’s raised more than $1.6 million for his race, but is counting on in-person campaigning to draw a contrast with Fischer and convince Nebraskans who usually voted Republican to seek him out.
“Republicans definitely have the rural vote wrapped up,” Osborn said. “They’re just just better at getting their messaging out there, owning the radio stations, the newspapers. And Democrats haven’t competed like they should have.”
Public polling has found Osborn running ahead of the Democrats, and close to Fischer. He talked with Americana about how he’d built the campaign, and why he thought he could break through in a state that’s voted Republican for president for 60 years.
Q&A
Americana: Why are you running as an independent?
Dan Osborn: I became an independent in 2016; really, after the Trump/Hillary debates. I just kind of became disenfranchised with the two parties, and it all seemed a little fake to me.
I hadn’t been a very political person until corporate greed came knocking on my door a few years ago, when I was president of my local union, and we went out on strike, at a time where the company was making record profits. The CEO gave himself a huge raise. The board enriched themselves. The stockholders enriched themselves, and they tried to take from their workers. I ran the strike here in Omaha for 77 days, and it just really opened my eyes to how much corporations actually run our politics. We don’t get a fair shake, because there’s no one like me in the Senate.
Americana: How have you seen that play out with Sen. Fischer; what are the decisions she’s made that reflect corporate capture?
Dan Osborn: Definitely the watering down of the Rail Safety Act. She takes a lot of money from the railroads, and she actually allowed railroads to police their own safety. They actually have some amount of deaths factored in as acceptable in their safety programs, and to me that’s unacceptable. And she takes a lot of money from the big four meat packers here. I think that’s where her stance on the border comes from, as far as voting down border bills. I truly think she wants an open border and influx of undocumented labor that these packers can exploit, continuing to enrich themselves and pay off Fischer.
Americana: So you would have supported this year’s border bill?
Dan Osborn: I support the fact that it was going to supply 1500 more border agents to help stop the influx of sex trafficking, human trafficking, and fentanyl.
Americana: What would you want to do about people in the country illegally?
Dan Osborn: We need some meaningful immigration reform. These people are our friends. They’re our neighbors. A lot of them have been here 30 years or more, and I think it’s time they get into Social Security already. There’s 80,000 open jobs in Nebraska that we can’t fill, that we can certainly use immigrant labor for. We need more immigration lawyers and judges, and we have to streamline the process, but at the same time, we do have to vet people. We don’t want to just allow willy-nilly people through that could be dangerous.
Americana: On abortion, you’ve said that you don’t see a federal role. The vice president has said that if Congress passed a bill restoring the Roe protections, she’d sign it. Would you oppose it?
Dan Osborn: That’s something to think about. I, you know, I do feel like this falls under protecting individual freedoms. I’m always going to default back to that. But I do believe that the framers of the Constitution set the federal government up to take care of the big stuff; the economy, foreign affairs. A government that’s into dictating morality to its people can be dangerous. But it’s tricky. [Osborn’s campaign said after the interview that he would support legislation like this, seeing abortion rights as an area where government shouldn’t interfere.]
Americana: I want to step back a bit, to your decision not to run with a party. Why did you fully reject the Democratic Party’s support?
Dan Osborn: I was talking to everybody. I was talking to the Libertarians. I was talking to some retired Republican senators. My hope was to create a big coalition and have an endorsement announcement saying, look, there’s something for everyone in this campaign. But the timeline didn’t line up. The Democrats wanted to endorse by May 18, and for the Libertarians, it was June 20 or something. So I made a decision that if I couldn’t have them all, I didn’t really want any of them. I wanted to be a true independent. It did make some folks mad. It sure did. But I needed to be true to myself.
Americana: If you get to the Senate, there’d be a negotiation about forming a majority; would you caucus with either party?
Dan Osborn: I’ve been giving that a lot of thought. I certainly am interested in challenging the system. I’m an independent; I’m not going to be a member of either party in the Senate. Everybody is going to try to influence how I vote, but I’m not going to join a party. That’s the way the Founding Fathers set this all up.
Americana: Ten years ago, I was covering an independent candidate in Kansas who hoped to win and form a bloc of independents who could lend their votes depending on the issue. Is that what you’re thinking?
Dan Osborn: The ramifications of an independent mechanic getting elected to the U.S. Senate in the red state of Nebraska — I think it could be huge. You start there. We’re creating the blueprint, the framework, to help other people with this perspective get elected in other states. I’ve got to win first, but if I do that, yes, we could certainly help other people who are like-minded, who just want to fix this broken Washington, and we do that with campaign finance reform, trying to end Citizens United, getting corporations out of our politics.