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IN SEARCH OF THE TRUMP-OSBORN VOTERS  
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Austin Ahlman
October 25, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ Dan Osborn is forging a new path through red states with
anti-corporate populism and working-class identity politics. _

Independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn chats with attendees after
speaking during a campaign stop at the Handlebend coffee shop in
O’Neill, Nebraska, October 14, 2024., Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP
Images

 

_This story is part of the _Prospect_’s __on-the-ground Election
2024 coverage. You can find all the other stories here
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NORFOLK, NEBRASKA – What should have been a sleepy Nebraska Senate
race could now upend national politics. Two-term incumbent Deb Fischer
has been caught flat-footed by populist independent and former union
leader Dan Osborn, who is giving her the fight of her life in a state
Donald Trump carried by nearly 20 points in 2020.

More than just control of the Senate—which professional handicappers
rate as strongly tilting toward Republicans
[[link removed]]—is
at stake. If he wins, Osborn’s unapologetic anti-corporate message
would throw a wrench into the business-friendly approach of both
parties. Republican incumbents in safe seats could be threatened by a
formidable new type of opponent. It also risks embarrassing national
Democrats if a firebrand steamfitter from Omaha is able to accomplish
in the heartland what many middle-of-the-road Democratic
standard-bearers could not.

As Osborn put it at a recent meet-and-greet in Ashland, “Imagine the
ramifications on American politics if Nebraska sends an independent
mechanic to the halls of power … Nurses, teachers, plumbers, bus
drivers—they can all know they can do the same thing.”

_MORE FROM AUSTIN AHLMAN_ [[link removed]]

Nebraska’s unique political institutions and history have greased
the wheels for a competitive race that, while revelatory in its
execution, appears somewhat obvious in hindsight. The nominally
nonpartisan unicameral legislature
[[link removed]] has primed
residents to vote for candidates without a Republican ballot line to
guide them. Those races typically feature two conservative-leaning
nominees trading barbs over whether the other is a closet liberal,
making the messaging
[[link removed]] from Fischer and
Republican-aligned groups painting Osborn as a wolf in sheep’s
clothing less effective than practically anywhere else in the country.
And the state’s cherished (but presumed dead) prairie populist
traditions have been activated by a candidate who condemns corruption,
unchecked corporate power, and career politicians.

But despite those unique factors and a spate of polling showing a dead
heat, national observers have been slow to acknowledge the strength of
Osborn’s candidacy, having been burned by recent independent Senate
candidates like Alaska’s Al Gross and Kansas’s Greg Orman, who
ultimately suffered lopsided defeats once Republican money came
pouring in. I myself, a born-and-raised Nebraskan, was skeptical until
just a few months ago, when the signs that Osborn’s message had
tapped into something different started becoming undeniable.

If he wins, Osborn’s unapologetic anti-corporate message would throw
a wrench into the business-friendly approach of both parties.

Several excited phone calls from my mother, an independent-minded
registered Republican who splits her ticket in a manner that makes
pollsters sweat, went unheeded over the summer. Only when my father, a
lifelong Republican who I have often butted heads with on politics,
issued his public endorsement
[[link removed]] of Osborn via
Facebook two weeks ago did the reality sink in.

In the cadence common among right-leaning antiestablishment voters,
sandwiched between memes about hunting, motorcycles, and the failures
of the Biden-Harris administration, my dad wrote, “Deb Fischer will
tell any lie she can find! I helped Deb get elected. I donated, I put
out signs, etc. I’m voting for Dan Osborn!” Even more surprising,
several of the likes and positive comments were from family friends
who I could not have previously imagined voting for anyone without an
R next to their name.

Still, my parents are odd ducks in Nebraska. Despite being registered
Republicans, they have voiced a disdain for party politics my whole
life. If Osborn carves a path to victory, he needs to make inroads
with loyal Republican voters in a year where Trump sits at the top of
the ballot. So I trekked back to my hometown of Norfolk and set off
across the state over the last week to see if Osborn-mania was real.
In the process, I interviewed over 30 Nebraskans for this story.

I STARTED MY JOURNEY AT THE WESTERN EDGE of Lincoln, where an Osborn
meet-and-greet drew around a hundred people last Sunday evening. On
the way into the city, I saw a number of Osborn yard signs in
unexpected places, including alongside signs for conservative
candidates and ballot referendum positions. In one grassy patch
outside Reg’s 7 Mile Steakhouse near Columbus, I saw a massive sign
featuring Osborn—who supports reinstating abortion protections once
guaranteed by _Roe v. Wade_—a few yards away from what appeared to
be a custom-printed sign urging Nebraskans to vote against ballot
question 439, which would guarantee the right to abortion up until the
point of fetal viability. When I asked the attendant about the sign,
he demurred on the apparent contradiction, saying only that “there
are lots of interesting views about the guy.”

When I rolled into the Big Red Keno where the Osborn campaign was
hosting the meet-and-greet, the room was packed to the brim, with an
overflowing crowd huddled around the door. I had already heard his
stump speech, which consists of fiery rhetoric about supporting
unions, reinvigorating antitrust laws, cutting wasteful spending
(particularly in the Department of Defense), and protecting public
benefits. “I don’t feel like there’s anybody like me in the
United States Senate … Less than 2 percent of our elected officials
come from the working class. I get frustrated with the corporate
agendas. I have a worker agenda,” he said the last time I heard him.
So I held back and took the temperature of the crowd.

I staked out a table near the bar and ordered some nachos while
waiting for Osborn to take questions. At the table next to me was an
older couple who resembled my parents. I asked about the “Osborn for
Senate” sign lying across their table. They initially declined to
speak, but one of the pair, a longtime union railroader by the name of
Brent Meyers, loosened up a bit when I said I hailed from Norfolk, and
noted a resemblance. After comparing family trees and deciding we may
in fact share an ancestor a few generations back, he opened up to me
about their politics.

He noted they were both Democrats who came to size up Osborn. For
them, most of the excitement was not about his challenge to Fischer,
but his staunch pro-worker and anti-corruption rhetoric. “He’s a
working man like myself,” Meyers told me. “Nebraska is a
traditionally Republican state. I’m a rarity. Even in a union shop,
most of us are Republicans.” When asked if his Republican colleagues
would follow suit, he felt confident many of them would.

The 7 percent of Nebraskan workers in a union will no doubt help
Osborn on his path to a majority, but they lack the numbers to make
the difference by themselves. So after scarfing down a few more
nachos, I dove into the crowd to see who else Osborn was attracting.

Dan Osborn shakes hands with students during a candidate forum at the
University of Nebraska Omaha, October 15, 2024.  Bill Clark/CQ Roll
Call via AP Images.

After several polite rejections—Nebraskans are notoriously private
and suspicious of media—I spoke with Erica Birky Rios, a Lincoln
resident who had her college-aged son in tow. Erica was a Democrat who
frequently volunteered for party candidates. Rios also attended my
alma mater Macalester College—a quintessential hippie-dippie liberal
arts school chock-full of normie liberals. For a second, it seemed to
me that Osborn’s candidacy was doomed; nobody wins statewide in
Nebraska on the backs of liberals alone.

But she tempered my skepticism slightly when she started talking about
the way Nebraska Democrats view the race. “I think there is some
mixed views across the party,” Rios explained. “Sometimes he comes
across fairly conservative.” Still, she seemed confident he would
consolidate Democratic voters, albeit begrudgingly, because of his
self-described libertarian stances on abortion and minority rights.
Rios opined that Democratic volunteers may not be showing up in droves
at events or putting up yard signs, but were on board for his
independent candidacy. It sounded to me that if there was a sweet
spot, Osborn had found it.

As the crowd dwindled, I approached a few other people who looked the
part of the Trump-Osborn voter—a quality that is much harder to
gauge in a place like Nebraska. After being brushed off a few more
times, I spoke with a registered nonpartisan sporting the most
impressive set of muttonchops I have ever seen. He introduced himself
as Connor Mullins. He declined to talk about the presidential race,
but was excited to explain how Osborn represented the middle of the
country in a way most centrist politicians do not. “When people
calculate the median American voter, they seem to think they want
fiscal conservatism and social liberalism,” Mullins lamented. “But
most people around here want social moderation and economic populism,
in my experience.” An on-the-nose observation that sounded like it
could have been ripped straight out of the pages of this magazine.

Mullins and I discussed the bygone era of prairie populism a bit
longer before I caught Osborn himself. He eyed me with the familiar
suspicion most Nebraskans display toward a journalist, and when
another attendee asked me to snap a picture of the two of them
together, he used the opportunity to dip out of the event.

I drove back to Norfolk unsure what, if anything, the night said about
the state of the race. Osborn needs Trump voters to be victorious. If
there were any to be found that night, I had missed them.

THAT CHANGED THE NEXT EVENING, at another Osborn meet-and-greet event
in the small exurb of Ashland, a rapidly growing Republican-leaning
city situated right smack in the middle of the 60 miles of I-80 that
separates Omaha and Lincoln.

Osborn’s campaign announced to the crowd of about 50 that he would
be late due to the heavy rain pelting the area that evening. When he
finally showed, in between his tough rhetoric about taking on big
corporations and breaking the two-party system, he called out a couple
members of the crowd by name, familiar faces from his time leading the
union at the Kellogg’s factory in Omaha, which mounted a successful
strike
[[link removed]] three
years ago.

I caught up with those attendees, Joe and Sherri Hallett, after the
speech. I was surprised to learn they were the exact kind of union
Republicans Brent Meyers had told me about the night before. They
remembered Osborn from their days at the plant, and had driven down to
Ashland to see if he was speaking the same way campaigning for Senate
as he did running the union. They seemed satisfied he was. Joe and
Sherri explained that they worked alongside Osborn at the Kellogg’s
factory but retired when COVID swept the country in the spring of
2020, a year before the strike that put Osborn on Nebraskans’ radar
for the first time. (Kellogg’s later fired Osborn, who now works as
a union steamfitter at the Boys Town facility in Omaha.)

After explaining that both she and her husband had voted for Trump
twice and planned to do so again—and had supported Fischer in her
previous races—Sherri said they were firmly on Osborn’s side in
the upcoming election, and that several other Republican union members
were leaning the same way. “Dan represents everything we work so
hard for,” Sherri told me.

Sherri pulled Osborn out of another conversation he was engaged in and
introduced him to me. I explained that we had already met, and asked
Osborn if he had time for a few questions. I got a pointed no, but
yelled out a few anyway as he headed for the door. While he waved off
most, my query about the uncertain future of current Federal Trade
Commission chair and aggressive corporate antagonist Lina Khan in a
potential Harris administration caught his ear. “I’m no political
analyst,” he told me, “but Lina Khan is doing good work, and we
need more people like her in government.” (Osborn’s campaign later
agreed to review a list of emailed questions for this article, but did
not respond by the time of publication.)

Austin Ahlman

While driving back to Norfolk and mulling over whether there were
enough Republican voters like the Halletts to seal the deal for
Osborn, I stopped at a Casey’s General Store in the small town of
West Point to fill up my tank. Casey’s are a common stop across the
heartland, and dot the landscape around virtually all of the small and
midsized Nebraska towns essential to Osborn’s insurgent candidacy.

I exchanged a few pleasantries with a man named Dan who was hauling a
load of produce. He initially dismissed political questions on the
grounds that he “doesn’t care and thinks they’re all corrupt,”
but he opened up a bit after I played the Nebraskan native card and
learned he had grown up on a farm just outside Norfolk. Dan agreed to
let me record an interview so long as I refrained from using his last
name, refrained from noting his current employer, and refrained from
specifying which type of produce lay in the back of his
truck—that’s a Nebraskan for you.

Dan said he was a registered nonpartisan who was largely disengaged
from politics. But Deb Fischer, in his view, was everything he had
said was wrong with the system. “It bothers me how much her bank
value has gone up. I mean, really, she should be wearing stickers just
like in that ad,” he said, referring to the viral Osborn campaign
ad [[link removed]] that compared
Fischer’s history of corporate contributions to patches on a NASCAR
jacket.

“I’ve got an Osborn sign in my truck right now,” he boasted.
When I asked him about the flood of Republican-funded attack ads
calling Dan Osborn a closet Democrat, he waved them away. “Don’t
believe everything you hear!”

AS I DROVE THE LAST 45 MINUTES HOME, my mind stuck on the math behind
the Senate race. Just under half of Nebraska’s registered voters
[[link removed]] are
Republicans, compared to just over a quarter registered Democrats. The
remaining quarter are registered nonpartisan and third-party voters.
While I felt pretty confident that Osborn was successfully
consolidating the latter groups, the thin slice of union Republicans I
believed might cross over did not strike me as quite enough for Osborn
to win.

It was too late in the evening to score any more interviews in public
spaces, so I whipped out my phone and called up my aunt on my mom’s
side, who I see once every few years. She happily agreed to chat about
the race, and I pulled up to her drive just after ten o’clock. What
I expected to be a short conversation—my aunt and uncle are both
unapologetic Trump voters who share few of my political views—ended
up being a deeply revealing two-hour talk about what it was like
trying to make it as a member of the working class and how those
struggles have informed their politics.

My aunt is the quintessential Obama-Trump voter who switched her
voting habits in the 2010s and never looked back. My uncle is a strong
conservative. If either of them had voted for a Democrat in the last
decade, I had not caught wind of it. But my aunt was adamant that she
was voting for Osborn, which shocked me. Even more shocking was what
closed the deal.

“What 100 percent made me say, ‘Yeah, I’m voting for Dan
Osborn,’ was that commercial I saw the other day where Trump is
endorsing Deb Fischer,” she explained, referencing a
somewhat stilted video
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cut aboard his private jet the prior week encouraging Nebraskans not
to vote for Osborn. (Trump noticeably says nothing about Fischer in
the ad.) “I am voting for Trump,” she emphasized, “but that
commercial completely turned me off. It made me want to vote for Dan
Osborn because of how it looked like a very forced advertisement.”

When asked whether anything Deb Fischer or her allies were saying on
television or in mailers was changing their views, they both said
firmly no. “Deb Fischer hasn’t given me anything. Period,” my
aunt said, before my uncle jumped in to suggest that “she has become
all about herself, and it’s just getting worse. It’s a politician
thing.”

I asked if they found the ads accusing Osborn of being a Democrat in
disguise convincing. They were similarly dismissive. Unlike other
candidates who have tried their hand at dislodging red-state
Republican incumbents in recent years, Osborn has never been
registered as a Democrat or formally associated with the Democratic
Party. And in Nebraska, voter registration histories are public, a
fact my aunt was quick to point out. “They’re thinking that by
saying those things, that Republicans aren’t even going to attempt
to do research,” she bristled. “All I would say is, do your
f***ing research.”

After a little prodding, my uncle, a lifelong mechanic who emphasized
the importance of Osborn’s focus on right-to-repair reforms,
disclosed that he too was leaning heavily toward splitting his ticket:
Trump and Osborn. “I’m voting for Trump because I believe he’s
the better choice for president,” he explained. “He’s not a
politician, he was a businessman. Is he a great person? No, I don’t
believe so, don’t get me wrong.” As for Osborn? “Osborn is a
working guy,” he said matter-of-factly. I left around midnight,
thinking for the first time that Osborn really was on track to win.

Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) speaking at the U.S. Capitol last year.
Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via AP Images

I GOT SOMETHING OF A REALITY CHECK the next day. I woke up early to
drive out to Deb Fischer’s base in Cherry County. Fischer started
her career in politics as a school board member and state senator
representing the area, one of the most rural parts of the state.
(Representatives for the Fischer campaign did not respond to multiple
requests to comment on this story or provide information about public
events in the race’s closing weeks.)

Media skepticism gets deeper the further west you go in Nebraska, and
despite wearing a pair of bibs and driving a rusted old Dodge pickup
my dad loaned me for the trip, I struck out the first five or six
times I asked for an interview along my ride. Instead, I focused on
the steady stream of radio ads, about half of which seemed to be
focused on the Osborn-Fischer race. I noted one strange phenomenon
though. The further west I went, the fewer signs I saw—for either
candidate. It struck me as odd to be in Fischer’s district of origin
without seeing more than one, especially when signs for what I assume
was a hotly contested state unicameral race were peppered across the
sandhills.

I finally caught a break at a Speedee Mart in Ainsworth, where a
pastor who asked to go by Wayne agreed to talk with me so long as I
did not disclose his real name or the denomination of his flock. We
started talking about how Osborn’s messaging was resonating in that
part of the state. He admitted to having few insights into whether
other Republicans were persuaded, but he was not. In his view,
Osborn’s rhetoric about big corporations and the wealthy sounded
more like “whining” than a message that reflected how most
ordinary Nebraskans feel. He acknowledged that Osborn’s hits on
Fischer for not holding public events across Nebraska were true, but
said that his parents were union members who had a hard time getting
by, and he was driving an SUV with almost 300,000 miles on it. If he
was not complaining, then why was Osborn?

I thanked him for his time and drove on toward Valentine, a town of
just over 2,000 people that serves as the major population hub for the
hundreds of miles of ranchland that surrounds it. (It’s also where
Tim Walz was raised.) While grabbing a drink at the Peppermill
Restaurant & Lounge, I managed a brief exchange with a woman who would
only agree to be interviewed if I promised to identify her solely as a
“Cherry County rancher.”

She provided the first strong defense of Deb Fischer I had heard all
week, noting that Fischer was an incumbent who had done a great job
for ranchers, and encouraging me to “follow the money.” This was a
reference to the air support
[[link removed]] Osborn
has received from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, largely bankrolled by
donors like Pierre Omidyar and George Soros. While the two are
primarily Democratic donors, they have also contributed to nonpartisan
think tanks with conservative and liberal leadership that advocate for
increased union power and support breaking up and limiting the power
of large corporations. Examples include American Compass and my
full-time employer, Open Markets Institute.

The Cherry County rancher acknowledged that she had not seen much of
Deb Fischer in recent years, but insisted that does not matter and
would not affect her support.

At yet another Speedee Mart, I talked to the sole Osborn voter of the
day, a former nurse and registered nonpartisan in her seventies who
asked to go by the name of Ellen. She told me that if there were
others like her, I was not likely to find them around here. I asked
about the lack of yard signs for either candidate, considering this is
what should be Fischer’s base of support. She explained that support
for Republicans was assumed a given, and if you did support an
independent (let alone a Democrat), you keep quiet about it for fear
it could hurt your standing in the community or, in her case, the
prospects of the business she operated. “It’s not tolerated, to
put out street signs,” she said. “I’m afraid to.”

Before making the long drive back, I decided to try my luck one more
time outside the Valentine Public Library. After getting brushed off a
few more times, I struck up a conversation with another nurse, a young
mom named Danielle. After hearing I was out to report on the Senate
race, she told me very flatly, “We support Deb Fischer out here.”
When nudged to explain what that meant, she told me that Fischer
“represents the Republican Party well.”

I asked about the perception that Fischer did not have a presence in
the state, and whether that had contributed to her vulnerability this
year. “You know, I’ve never seen her out here. So yes, I would
agree sometimes people get a little frustrated with that,” she
conceded. “But, I mean, how much can you cover when you’re in
politics?” She said that she receives pro-Fischer and anti-Osborn
mailers practically every day. It struck me as odd that Republicans
would dedicate that much money to pummeling voters in Fischer’s
backyard, in a county where Republicans regularly win upwards of 80
percent of the vote.

I made my way back to my hometown not knowing what to make of my
experience. While I had quite literally seen few signs of enthusiasm
for Fischer, I had little to show for my hunt for Trump-Osborn voters
in the reddest part of the state.

DURING MY FOUR DAYS CANVASSING THE STATE, the already saturated
airwaves on cable news and radio only seemed to get worse. One late
$3.5 million ad buy
[[link removed]] from
the national Republican Senate Leadership Fund cemented what my own
conversations had led me to believe: The race is a toss-up.

Osborn has released a steady stream of polls
[[link removed]] over
the last few months demonstrating a tied race or narrow lead. Fischer,
on the other hand, has released just two, the most recent showing her
leading by mid-single digits and struggling to crack 50 percent—a
stunning admission for a two-term Republican incumbent in a state as
red as Nebraska. The only high-quality independent polling, which was
commissioned by Split Ticket
[[link removed]] back
in August, indicates it has been neck and neck for months. In what I
can only assume is a conscious decision to avoid egg on their faces,
public pollsters have avoided the race even in its closing weeks,
meaning we are all flying blind.

The odds are no doubt stacked against Osborn. Even losing by single
digits would be an accomplishment in its own right in Nebraska. But my
discussions with everyday Nebraskans demonstrate that a path exists if
he can consolidate the state’s nonpartisan, Democratic, and
third-party voters, while targeting the roughly 5 percent of
Republicans in union households and the oft-discussed Obama-Trump
voters. Every person I spoke to who falls into those latter two
categories told me they plan to vote for Osborn.

If Osborn does make it into the Senate, these voters’ comments
indicate he is coming with a mandate to radically transform politics
as we know it. That should scare the establishment classes of both
parties.

AUSTIN AHLMAN is a reporter and researcher with the Open Markets
Institute’s Center for Journalism & Liberty, where he writes about
the intersection of corporate power, public policy, and politics.

_THE AMERICAN PROSPECT_ is devoted to promoting informed discussion
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reflecting on 25 years of politics and change.

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