Dan Osborn’s independent U.S. Senate run in Nebraska came closer to winning than anyone expected. 

While running for U.S. Senate in Nebraska, working class candidate Dan Osborn characterized the Senate as “a country club of millionaires that work for billionaires.” 

In November, he almost crashed their party.

Osborn, a 49-year old former local union president who helped lead a multi-state strike against Kellogg’s cereal company, was recruited by railroad workers to challenge two-term incumbent Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican. Rail is a major industry in Nebraska, and Fischer had voted to break the 2022 national railroad strike. She also opposed the Railway Safety Act.

Osborn’s labor-backed independent campaign was, for many months, ignored by the mainstream press and even progressive media outlets (though we covered it). 

The Nebraska Democratic Party, which ended up not fielding a candidate, was miffed by Osborn’s decision not to participate in its primary or seek the party’s endorsement. Still, by October, the Senate Majority PAC had shifted $3.8 million to an independent expenditure committee supporting him. 

Osborn’s candidacy was initially given little chance of success by national and local experts because he was, in their view, a complete unknown. Union political directors in Washington, D.C., were skeptical as well.

But Osborn’s campaign clearly hit a chord among working people. Last fall, the New York Times reported, Republican Super PACs and national party operatives were forced to launch a $15 million advertising blitz to blunt Osborn’s homestretch momentum against Fischer. On election day, Osborn’s 47 percent showing against Fischer—in a state Kamala Harris lost by 59 to 39 percent—confirmed the crossover appeal of Osborn’s blue-collar agenda among voters in Nebraska.

This unexpectedly strong showing drew post-election praise from Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and others. As Sanders told The Nation, Osborn ran as a strong trade unionist who “took on the corporate world’ in an “extraordinary campaign” that reached working class people all over Nebraska and proved that many want real change.

In late November, when Osborn was preparing to return to work as a rank-and-file member of Steamfitters Local 664, he and his supporters formed a Working Class Heroes Fund. The goal of this new political action committee, which has already raised $200,000, is to recruit, train, and support more blue-collar candidates for public office. 

Osborn also hopes to persuade more working-class people to vote in their own economic self-interest, rather than for parties and politicians backed by “special interests and billionaires.” 

Osborn’s call echoes that of union activists in the late 1990s, who launched a ten-year effort to build a Labor Party as a political vehicle for the working class. One of its goals—unfortunately, never achieved—was to help more working-class leaders run for office themselves, as challengers to business-backed candidates from the two major parties.

In this interview, longtime Stansbury Forum contributor Steve Early asked Osborn about his experience as a first-time political candidate, how he outperformed Harris against a MAGA Republican, and his hopes for the Working Class Heroes Fund.

Based on your recent campaign experience, what advice do you have for other labor activists similarly disenchanted with both major parties and thinking about running for office? 

Hopefully, our campaign will pave the way for more truck drivers, nurses, teachers, plumbers, carpenters, and other working-class people to run for office, challenge the system, and win by uniting the working class across party lines. 

People are hungry for anything outside the two parties. They know that you shouldn’t have to be a self-funding crypto billionaire to get elected to public office. They’re hungry for working-class candidates. It’s a huge opportunity for all of us, and we need to seize it.

Your best bet for a labor candidate is someone who needs to be actively recruited and did not look in the mirror one day and decide they should be a state legislator or member of Congress. If there hadn’t been people in the Nebraska labor movement who came to me and asked me to run, it would probably never have occurred to me.

If you’re running independent, you should be independent. Changing your party registration overnight can be a liability, and I would discourage people who are thinking of being “tactically” independent from doing this. 

We will always start out under-resourced and outgunned. So we have to pick our spots. A lot has to go right. It definitely helps to end up in a one-on-one general election contest with an out-of-touch Republican incumbent, rather than a three-way race in which a labor independent might be regarded as a “spoiler.”

How were you able to convince local and national unions that your independent candidacy was viable?

Well, it took a while. We didn’t see our first union donation check until about five months after I announced. The United Association (UA) people [Plumbers and Pipefitters] believed in and fought for us from very early on. The railroaders of Central Nebraska were very strong for us. But they were exceptions. It took most labor people a long, long time to come around.

Union resources are limited, and decision makers want to see you’re for real. Those early days when you have to prove yourself, that’s what really tests you as a candidate. We had some dark days early on, believe me.

I wish there was a little more willingness on the part of the people who hold the purse strings to lift up candidates earlier in an election cycle. But eventually, unions saw us raising money. They saw the polling about Deb Fischer’s unpopularity and electoral vulnerability. And that’s what it took to convince them.

When you got more labor endorsements, how did you work with Nebraska unions to involve their rank-and-file members as signature gatherers  during your nomination petition drive or as phone bank and door-to-door canvassing volunteers in the homestretch?

It’s interesting. Even at the end, we didn’t see huge organized labor turnout efforts. There were unions who did great work on the ground, for sure. The UA turned out their apprentices in bulk. Insulators Local 39 in Omaha punched way above their weight. The railroad unions were with us from the start.

But mostly—and I think this is true in other states—our unions don’t generally have some great ground game, ready to go, even on behalf of someone who is one of their own. We definitely tried to get every local to release staff for election work and set up their own canvassing operations and phone banks to involve more members. 

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This piece originally appeared in Labor Notes

For more on Dan Osborn: In March 2024 Steve Early interviewed Dan Osborn about his independent run for Senator from Nebraska.  You can read that March 2024 piece here