OpinionMichelle Goldberg
Dan Osborn, an independent who is challenging the Republican senator Deb Fischer. Credit...David Robert Elliott for The New York Times
Supported by
By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Ashland, Neb.
The first person I met at a Monday night meet-and-greet for Dan Osborn, the independent Nebraska Senate candidate, was a Donald Trump-voting Republican named Joe Hallett. He’d worked, alongside his wife, Sherri, with Osborn at Omaha’s Kellogg plant. Explaining Osborn’s appeal, Joe said, “He’s not a millionaire or anything like that.” Sherri added: “He works hard. We did the same thing.”
Neither was a fan of Osborn’s opponent, the Republican senator Deb Fischer. “We were never impressed with her because she was never personable,” said Sherri. “She was never around.”
Osborn, by contrast, has been around a lot. The Monday event, at a cider house in Ashland, a town about 30 miles from Omaha, was one of more than 170 he’s done all over the state. It drew a few dozen people — more Democrats and independents than Republicans — and Osborn stayed to talk and shake hands until the place closed. Afterward, I went with him to a nearby bar to talk about his surprisingly competitive race against Fischer, which has become an unexpected problem for Republicans as they seek to retake the Senate.
As we walked, a young opposition researcher who tracks Osborn at most of his events shouted questions about which presidential candidate he’d voted for in 2020, hoping to catch him on camera saying something damaging. Osborn refused to answer, just as he won’t say whom he’ll vote for in November, insisting that the heat of partisan politics makes substantive discussion of the issues impossible. When I asked him to name a politician in Washington he hoped to work with, he said he hadn’t given the matter much thought.
The bar, with its brown walls, dropped ceiling and fluorescent overhead lights, was the apotheosis of Midwestern drab. Osborn, a tattooed Navy veteran and former union leader with a short gray beard, declared it his kind of place. As he nursed a Busch Light, I sensed he was eager to finish our interview and join Joe Hallett, who was waiting to catch up with him. But when I mentioned a book I’d heard Osborn talk about, “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy,” by the progressive writer Matt Stoller, he seemed to perk up.
“What that book taught me was this is not a new idea what we’re doing here,” he said of his campaign, which is focused on the predations of concentrated wealth. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, he said, corporations have sought to buy more and more political power, and though they succeed for a time, people eventually revolt. “I........