Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic who ran as an independent Senate candidate in Nebraska, came up short in his quest to unseat Senator Deb Fischer, a low-profile Republican whose closer-than-expected victory in a red state clinched Senate control for her party on election night.
But Mr. Osborn’s 47 percent of the vote in Nebraska well outpaced Vice President Kamala Harris’s 39 percent, and in what he called his “almost success,” there might be clues to how a more populist approach could wrest the working class from Republicans, not through partisan warfare but class consciousness.
“Who’s the one doing the dividing here?” Mr. Osborn asked in an interview on Monday. “I think it’s the people who are laughing all the way to the bank while us common folk live paycheck to paycheck.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Osborn, 49, will return to work as a union steamfitter in Omaha, facing a pile of bills from his time off campaigning, including a $4,000 veterinarian’s bill for the Addison’s disease his dog developed during the election year. He is also announcing a new super PAC, the Working Class Heroes Fund, to try to recruit more blue-collar workers to run for office, and to organize the working class to vote in their economic self-interest.
“I just think it means everything that working people have a seat at the table because we have enough, you know, high-profile lawyers and business execs,” Mr. Osborn said. “I’m not saying they shouldn’t have a seat at the table. Of course they should for what they’ve accomplished in their lives. But I feel like what I’ve accomplished as a working person, although it’s not as glittery and glorious as a C.E.O. starting a company, I’ve certainly given my family a good life.”
Before Mr. Osborn announced his campaign late last year, his only leadership role had been leading his union on strike at an Omaha Kellogg’s cereal plant in 2021. With little money and almost no name recognition, the mechanic crisscrossed Nebraska, leaning on union workers far from the Democratic pockets of Omaha and Lincoln while rejecting the endorsement of the Nebraska Democratic Party.
He tried to prove his independence with a pro-gun, tough-on-the-border message, but he also favored abortion rights and new rules to make it easier for unions to organize.
Mainly, though, his biggest calling card was his genuine working-class identity and a penchant for listening. It wasn’t a particularly substantive campaign — he still struggles to articulate the policies that distinguished him from Republicans and Democrats — but it was one that avoided the impression that many Democrats leave, that in appealing to working-class voters, they talk down to them.
“I’m not a huge political person,” Mr. Osborn allowed. “I’m not certain how many people ran similar to me, numbers-wise. I can just tell you I spoke to people like a person. And that was the secret to my almost success.”
He added, “I had 180 publicly advertised events; a lot of those people in the events were just like me, people who live paycheck to paycheck, working for a living.”
“And whether it was a group of five or a group of 80, we would sit down, focus on issues and try to resolve things,” he said.
The most resonant issues, he said, revolved around the yawning wealth gap between the billionaire classes on the coasts and virtually everyone else in the middle. Advocacy, he said, should not be built around forcing everyone to share but creating “an equal playing field” where “mom-and-pop shops” are able to compete with prices of chain stores like the Dollar Generals commonplace in Nebraska’s small towns.
For much of this year, Ms. Fischer and the Republican campaign apparatus in Washington largely ignored Mr. Osborn, but last month, as polling showed a tight race, Republican super PACs and operatives swept in to rescue Ms. Fischer. A blitz of advertising portrayed Mr. Osborn as “a Democrat in disguise.” The race also turned personal, with attacks on his family.
Mr. Osborn, a political neophyte, remains angry and hurt by the way the campaign closed.
“I’ve been in a hole, licking my wounds,” he said, before adding that he can’t afford to take any more time off.
“I’m going back to work tomorrow as a steamfitter because I tried to call all my bill collectors,” he said, and they didn’t care “that I ran a close Senate race. They want their money, they want their mortgage, they want their car payments, their insurance, their electrical bills.”
Even now, with the campaign over, he insists he is an independent, although he has supported Democrats in the past. But he said his super PAC’s recruitment of genuinely working-class candidates will be nonpartisan. He does not care what party they want to run with, as long as they truly come from the working class.
“If I have to go around the country on my weekends to help other working-class people get a seat at their table,” he said, “whether that’s state legislatures or county boards, however that looks, that’s how I want to help.”
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