Dan Osborn pursues a prairie populist upset in Nebraska U.S. Senate race

LINCOLN — In a downtown bar on O Street in the capital city, Dan Osborn drank a 16-ounce draft Coors Banquet Beer. 

During a sit-down interview with the Nebraska Examiner at O’Rourke’s Tavern, the occasional patron walked up to Osborn to tell him they support his bid against U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb. Some said they hope he pulls off an upset that would cause political shockwaves nationally. Osborn took a swig between answers and joked that his opponent would probably criticize him for drinking.  

The former Omaha union leader and registered nonpartisan said his second Senate bid in three years has taught him the system is “rigged.” 

“Trump was right, the system’s rigged … but it’s rigged by the big people and the people with the money that have the influence,” Osborn said. 

He means people like Ricketts, his likely opponent in the 2026 general election, a former two-term governor and the face of a prominent family of donors to conservative causes who steers the state’s dominant political operation. 

Osborn, who lost by six percentage points in 2024 to Republican U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer, has built a brand on his Navy veteran hat and flannel shirts, fed partly by hosting meet-and-greets in bars like this one across Nebraska. 

The Osborn campaign has held roughly two dozen such town halls over the past few months, reminding many of his campaign’s approach in 2024. Osborn prides himself on ‘old school politics,’ hearing from Nebraskans directly, where they live, and asking them what they want from Washington. 

“I would say the number one issue that people talk about first is the economy and the cost of everything right now,” Osborn said. 

He said he thinks his campaign should connect with people who’ve given up on politics, people who shrug their shoulders when a campaign ad comes on, who think the system wasn’t built for them and who might want better.

His closer-than-expected race against Fischer made Osborn a national political name, and his style of populism — focused on the working class, union organizing and kitchen table issues — has been talked about as a possible way out of the bipartisan screaming match that surrounds most political races. 

Republicans are taking him more seriously this time. The National Republican Senatorial Committee started the 2026 Nebraska race by running digital ads saying a social media account with ties to Osborn had liked gay porn and criticized him for his stance on the federal government shutdown. Osborn has argued Democrats were right to seek congressional leverage for extending the enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits to keep health insurance premiums from sharply increasing.

Many in the public first learned of Osborn in 2021, when he lead an 11-week strike of Nebraska Kellogg’s workers as the company pushed for concessions in a new union contract despite the food company posting record profits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kellogg’s workers secured a five-year contract that gives wage increases, a path to eliminating a two-tiered wage system and enhanced benefits.

Osborn was later fired by Kellogg’s management for allegedly watching Netflix while on the job, a step he viewed as retaliation for leading the strike. In the years since, Kellogg’s has announced it would close the Omaha plant by 2026. Fischer’s team at the time blamed Osborn for the loss of local jobs. Union leaders defended Osborn’s work and said they were working to keep the plant open.

Ricketts’ campaign constantly calls Osborn a “fake independent” and repeatedly points to Osborn receiving donations and support from Democrats as examples of what they see as his ties to the state’s largest minority party. 

Opponents hammer him for using ActBlue, an online fundraising tool that promotes itself as a tool for helping elect Democrats. They also point to his tacit support from Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb, who has said Democrats want to break Republicans’ hold on Nebraska politics.

Osborn and his campaign manager, John Dolan, laugh off the critiques — describing it as “comical” that the best that the Ricketts team came up with is calling Osborn “fake.” 

Osborn said he uses ActBlue because he couldn’t also get on the Republican-aligned fundraising tool WinRed. Osborn added that he viewed ActBlue like PayPal or GoFundMe, as little more than a platform for donating political money, and said he doesn’t take stock in the tool being “associated with Democrats.”

Dolan, at the bar, said team Ricketts can “read into it all they f— want,” while previews of the New York Giants and Philadelphia Eagles flashed on TV. 

Some nonpartisan candidates in other states who have followed Osborn’s 2024 approach are avoiding using ActBlue to sidestep being associated with the Democratic Party. The fundraising platform changed its rules this year to allow use by some Independent and nonpartisan candidates. 

Osborn said he could’ve done the same, but the “alternative would be to not raise the money we need to win.” 

“You have two choices, and you can’t have the other one,” Osborn said. 

On the campaign trail, Osborn sometimes confuses Democrats and Republicans because of the way he talks about President Donald Trump. Osborn has previously said he supported Trump’s stance on China, the border and “draining the swamp.” Like many labor leaders and former labor leaders, he holds mixed views on Trump’s tariffs, he told NBC News.

He has also criticized Trump for his tax and spending bill, aka the “big, beautiful bill,” which he said would overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy “off the backs of people.” 

Trump’s major legislative victory remains unpopular with Americans. Osborn says he plans to campaign on what the law actually does, which he says hurts working people. He says it cements tax cuts from the first Trump administration that primarily benefit high earners, while giving some new temporary tax breaks to workers earning less.

The latest ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos polling showed about 6 in 10 Americans blame Trump for the current rate of inflation, and more than 6 in 10 disapprove of how Trump is handling tariffs, the economy and managing the federal government. A poll from NBC News indicated that two-thirds of voters say Trump has not lived up to their expectations on the economy and cost of living.

The federal government has been experiencing the longest shutdown in U.S. history, which could soon end. Osborn told Fox News Host Jessica Tarlov on her podcast that he supported the shutdown. The Ricketts’ campaign, and the NRSC criticized Osborn’s backing of the shutdown as another example of him siding with Democrats. The NRSC called him “another Democrat lap dog.” 

While Osborn said he doesn’t know everything about the shutdown, he said he would have fought for the  insurance subsidies, the tax credits at the heart of Senate Democrats’ efforts to keep the government closed until they force at least a vote on extending them.  

He also told the Lincoln Journal Star last month that the shutdown was “in line with what I’ve been saying all along,” that “we’re in this two-party doom loop.”

Until recently, Republican congressional leadership had expressed little interest in negotiating on the health care subsidies during the shutdown. Osborn said he’s relieved the shutdown appears to be headed for an end, but he remains concerned about rising healthcare costs. 

Osborn said the role of the federal government is to protect its citizens, which should include access to “access to freaking hospitals when we’re sick, because there’s no Democrat or Republican in the back of an ambulance.”

On the campaign trail, Trump has promised “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” after the Biden administration saw illegal border crossings spike at the end of 2023 but start decreasing in 2024.  

Osborn said he supports stronger border security. He ran an ad in the previous cycle offering to help Trump build his border wall. He said Trump has done a good job securing the border but he doesn’t like how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Trump have been making light of enforcement. 

ICE and other government agencies have used online memes to gain attention and rile up a part of the GOP base. Homeland Security, for instance, posted an AI-generated photo of a cornfield this year with ears wearing ICE hats and a caption of “Coming Soon: The Cornhusker Clink.” 

Trump posted “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning” with an edited photo of himself depicted as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore from the Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now.

“Even if you think it’s funny, that is not professional coming from the White House,” Osborn said. 

Nebraska, like the rest of the country, has seen an increase in immigration detention activity, including an ICE raid on Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha earlier this year. The state expects to begin receiving federal migrant detainees in the state’s new immigration detention facility in McCook earlier this month. 

Osborn said Trump — like most administrations before him — isn’t doing the comprehensive immigration reform that’s humane and that’s going to fix the problem “because it’s an economic issue.”

He has argued for months that the “big four meat packers” benefit from having a “wide open border with no immigration policy, because they can exploit the labor, enrich themselves, and then they donate millions of dollars to candidates so they won’t do anything about it.” Trump in recent days also attacked the meatpacking industry on social media, posts applauded by many in Nebraska’s all-GOP congressional delegation, including Fischer.

Democrats have talked about Osborn as potentially offering them a roadmap back to national power and relevance, based on his outreach to many of the working-class voters party surveys show it lost touch with. 

But he doesn’t think about how his campaign fits into the bigger picture of politics. He said he “just wakes up every day and goes to work.”

People around Osborn said they see the bigger picture. Dolan, his campaign manager, said voters are tired of “the same caricature of people getting elected into government and then doing nothing.” 

Dolan said he has heard from many who say “the only way we’re going to get anything done in the country is by electing independents.”

The Osborn campaign says it plans to spend a lot of time next year on college campuses as it tries to figure out the “puzzle” of voter turnout. Osborn’s team is focused on turnout because midterm elections often have lower turnout than in presidential election years, and Nebraska’s smaller population means smaller increases in turnout can have a significant impact in close races.

“​​Ricketts is going to be on your TV and your radio,” Osborn said. “I’m going to hopefully be in your living room, in your business, and having a beer and chatting it up.”

The U.S. Senate general election is Nov. 3.