In a string of recent town hall stops across Nebraska, US Senate candidate Dan Osborn made it clear he has enemies.
As expressed to residents in Lincoln, and Omaha, and Kearney, Osborn has his eyes set on those he holds responsible for the economic issues facing Nebraskans: the wealthiest 1% of the population.
Everything else–especially the culture war issues so often ginned up by the right in a Republican-dominated state–is a distraction, according to the registered independent.
During Osborn’s most recent town hall on May 21 in South Omaha, his class-first approach to politics was underscored during an exchange with a mother who said her main political concerns were “social issues.”
She asked Osborn if he would commit to signing a recently launched petition aimed at banning transgender students in Nebraska from participating in public K-12 and collegiate sports teams not aligned with their sex assigned at birth.
Osborn responded that he’d need to read it, first. In dramatic fashion, the woman whipped out a folded copy of the petition text, marched to the front of the room, and slapped it on the podium Osborn stood behind.
He thanked her and said he would read it, adding that he wouldn’t sign anything “rooted in hate or discrimination.”
The scene turned rowdy as other town hall attendees became frustrated and shouted at the woman.
With a low register, Osborn cut through the uproar.
“Look, the average age for the first time homeowner in this country is 40,” he said. “I’m more concerned about that.”
The room fell into pin-drop silence.
Osborn took several more questions before the town hall concluded, tying issues of foreign policy, immigration, and the environment back to his populist economic message.
In an exclusive follow-up interview, Osborn told Courier Nebraska that his reason for redirecting the woman’s question was personal.
Following an unsuccessful US Senate run in 2024 against Republican Sen. Deb Fischer, Osborn said he asked his family over dinner one night if he should try again in 2026, this time against incumbent Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts.
“My daughter said, ‘Dad, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to buy a house.’ The younger generation is experiencing financial nihilism, to the point where they’re gambling on Polymarket, looking for a leg up,” Osborn said. “We need to course correct, then we can start talking about all these culture war issues.”
Osborn’s working-class emphasis, while rooted in own labor organizing background, isn’t totally self-selected. Across his 200 town hall events in 2024, and nearly 70 in his current campaign, Osborn said “the vast majority of attendees talk about affordability.”
And while he admits concern for genuinely nuanced social issues, “I think it’s just a political distraction,” he said.
“I call it ‘paycheck populism.’ You can relate every issue back to a paycheck, one way or another. And costs are rising at a rate that’s not sustainable for our paychecks,” Osborn said. “Those are the things that we got to be focused on … At the end of the day, if we’re not feeding our people, these culture war issues don’t matter.”
Osborn’s paycheck populism platform includes:
- Reclaiming congressional authority over tariffs and spending — “It seems like we have a bunch of jellyfish on Capitol Hill with no spines,” he said.
- Breaking up monopolies and duopolies — particularly Visa and Mastercard, agricultural input companies, and meatpacking corporations.
- A lifetime ban on former members of Congress from lobbying
- Banning stock trading by members of Congress and their families
- Reasserting congressional war powers — “This war in Iran is costing us a billion dollars a day,” he said, pointing to rising fuel costs at home.
- Combatting corporate price gouging and shrinkflation — notably calling out his former employer Kellogg’s.
- Passing Right-to-Repair legislation — specifically criticizing “planned obsolescence” and proprietary restrictions on John Deere equipment.
“I think capitalism is a great system. Unchecked capitalism is not,” Osborn said. “Right now, it’s not a free market. It’s controlled by the Few. This system is currently operating exactly the way it’s designed, for the corporations and the 1%.”
A RAND Corporation study found that, from 1975 to 2018, nearly $50 trillion in aggregate wages and economic growth was diverted from the bottom 90% of American workers to the top 1%.
“That is absolutely insane,” Osborn said of the study.
Ricketts has worked to link his independent challenger to left-leaning candidates across the country.
“Those are the things that he’s going to want to try to keep me talking about, because he doesn’t have a leg to stand on,” Osborn said.
While Fischer declined a debate in 2024, Osborn hopes to take the stage opposite Ricketts. If he does, he plans to grill him about his vote to cut Medicaid by roughly $1 trillion over the next decade. The bill is expected to cause tens of thousands of Nebraskans to lose their health coverage.
“Your family’s got eight and a half billion dollars. Why do you want to go to the US Senate and take people’s healthcare away from them?” Osborn said of Ricketts. “You could do anything in this world. I mean, that’s f*ck you money right there. Go do something else, man.”
If he had to boil his campaign platform down to one priority, Osborn said it would be reversing Citizens United v. FEC—the 2010 US Supreme Court decision which allows corporations and donors to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.
“I don’t take corporate money. My campaign is powered by the people,” he said. “I want to show people around the country, and definitely in Nebraska, that you can win elections without taking corporate and special interest money. We’re creating the benchmark.”
