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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.
This is “The Opinions,” a show that brings you a mix of voices from “New York Times” Opinion. You’ve heard the news. Here’s what to make of it.
My name is Michelle Goldberg, and I’m an opinion columnist at “The New York Times.”
I have felt so paralyzed by a combination of utter terror and boredom when following this election, I mean, because the stakes are so terrifically high, and yet there is so little new to say about the depravity of Donald Trump and the logjam that we’re stuck in as a country. So I wanted to go to a place where something new and potentially hopeful is developing. And weirdly enough, I found it in Nebraska.
I’m standing outside a cider brewery in Ashland, Nebraska. I’m about to go in here.
Nobody thought that the Senate race in Nebraska was going to be remotely competitive. Everybody assumed that the Republican Senator, Deb Fischer, was pretty safe.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, thanks, everyone, for being here. And —
And this independent candidate named Dan Osborn has come out of nowhere and really is giving Deb Fischer a run for her money and making it close to a toss-up. His race could be a potential model for people who want to challenge Republican power in places where the Democratic Party really isn’t competitive.
I want to continue to be a voice for working families, not just union families, but all working people across the state of Nebraska. Because —
Dan Osborn is an independent. He won’t say who he voted for in 2020 for president. He won’t say who he’s going to vote for in 2024 for president. Economically, his platform and his agenda is very traditionally Democratic. He wants to raise corporate taxes. He wants to make it easier for people to unionize.
I get frustrated with the corporate agendas. I have a worker agenda. I got elected —
Osborn spent 20 years as an industrial mechanic at a Kellogg’s plant in Omaha. He eventually became president of the union and became very politicized during negotiations over a new contract in 2021, when he felt like Kellogg’s was really being unfair to workers who had sacrificed a lot to keep the plant open through COVID.
We were all working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, with no time off. But we kept all four of those plants running at 100 percent capacity, and we made them record profits. We figured they’d share a little sliver of the pie. But instead, they sat across the negotiating table from us and they said, we’re going after your health insurance. We’re going after your cost of living wage adjustment, which was our only form of wage increases —
He ended up leading about 500 people at that plant out on strike. Kellogg’s ended up having to accede to a lot of their demands. And they were successful.
Mind if I ask you a few questions about what brought you out?
That’s fine.
I met a guy named [? Joe ?] [? Hallett, ?] a Donald Trump supporter. And Joe was there with his wife, Sherri —
Sherri with an S —
With an I.
— not with a C.
Yes.
— both of whom are Republicans —
Oh, you’re both Republicans.
Yes.
— also a very strong Dan Osborn supporter and someone who had known him at Kellogg.
He’s not a millionaire or anything like that.
Yeah.
He was a mechanic. Dan’s a mechanic. We know what it’s like as the working class.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The reason that the unions wanted an independent candidate to challenge Deb Fischer was because they didn’t want someone who was going to be bogged down in what they call, quote unquote, “wedge issues” that they’d feel alienate social conservatives in Nebraska from the Democratic Party.
But when it comes to big picture policy, Dan Osborn is not completely at odds with the Democratic Party. So, for example, he says that he is personally against abortion, but he believes........