Dan Osborn's populist run against U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., in 2024 made national headlines for turning an expected safe race for Republicans into a potential upset. He attracted an extraordinary fundraising haul of $14 million for a federal candidate in Nebraska without direct ties to a major party, including some late money from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee once they saw his momentum.
I discovered the independent candidacy of Dan Osborn back in May, and Michelle Goldberg reminded me of him this morning, with something titled, "How to Make Senate Republicans Pay For Their Awful Bill." Dan Osborn is looking to flip Pete Ricketts' Nebraska Senate seat from bright red Republican to shining purple left populism.
Short Sketch: He's liberal on abortion and on the rights of organized labor -- yet he ran for U.S. Senate in '24 as a hard-nosed critic of both Democratic and Republican machines and said he agreed with Trump about the border and about confronting China. He's a believer in the 2nd Amendment but accepts safety limitations. He presented in 2024 as an irritable independent, a powerful emanation of working-class anger. A master machinist, so he knows how to work effectively with his hands, and he's got a head for union leadership. Before that he was a Navy man and a National Guardsman, all of which has made him a plain talker who radiates steel.
Does he have a platform? My good Lord, yes. It's quite extensive. These are points that caught my attention:
Pete Ricketts
He wants to ban billionaires from buying elections. The current senator, Pete Ricketts, is the billionaire eldest son of Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, and as a 2-term former governor of Nebraska, he's the boss hog. Osborn: "We have one man who's bought up every level of government in Nebraska. That's wrong. It doesn't matter whether it's George Soros or Pete Ricketts: spending millions to buy an election undermines this country." (Osborn has dubbed this contest, “The C.E.O. versus the guy from the shop floor."
Secure the border: "Legal immigration helped build this country and is critical to Nebraska’s economy. Illegal immigration creates a pool of cheap labor with no rights and is detrimental to every American worker."
He is maybe most passionate about "the right to repair," from which I learned that the basic human freedom of farmers and ranchers to repair their essential equipment has been seriously eroded by manufacturers, many of whom now restrict repair options, often requiring customers to use only their authorized service centers or to purchase new devices instead of repairing existing ones. Such lifetime repair and upkeep contracts have also run small-time auto shops out of business. Something needs to be done!
Profiteering off Senior Services: "Private equity buys out elder care facilities, saddles them with debt, forces them to sell off real estate holdings, and pockets the savings. Facilities are then forced to reduce staffing and services. Overwhelmingly, we see two outcomes of private equity buyouts: decline in quality of care, and increase in Medicare spending. [Therefore] we must: Block private equity firms from taking over healthcare firms providing covered services when such a takeover would put those being served at risk."
School vouchers: "Although sometimes well-intended, voucher systems weaken public schools and punish rural areas that lack private options."
Handouts to Big Pharma: "Taxpayers have sent Moderna $10 billion in COVID subsidies. The CEO of Moderna made $398 million in 2022. Moderna just more than quadrupled the price of the COVID vaccine. This is madness. Stop handing huge subsidies to super-profitable pharmaceutical companies. In the heat of the pandemic, Congress handed over tens of billions of dollars to Big Pharma. Some of this turned into the vaccine. Much of it turned into CEO pay. As Senator, I will never support handing huge pharmaceuticals a blank check."
Osborn issued a statement just yesterday reaffirming his independence from the Democratic Party, promising if elected to caucus with neither party. “I’ve been a registered independent from the time I could vote,” Osborn said, and I checked: It's true. His designation as Independent is not a recent or convenient smokescreen for some standard Libtard running disguised as a Libertarian in a heavily Republican state.
Democrats are often scared of jumping on a populist bandwagon, because of the anti-elitist vibe embedded in populism's understanding of the hidden wounds of class. But at least the Nebraska Democratic Party more than hinted support: “Breaking up the one-party stranglehold on our state is going to take an unlikely alliance of Democrats, Republicans and Independents coming together to fix a very broken Washington, D.C.”