Though he’s running as an independent, Osborn is so far the most promising of the progressive-backed, working-class coded candidates whom the Left hopes will take seats from Republicans in the midterm elections. Incumbent Sen. Pete Ricketts is still widely perceived to be the frontrunner in the Cornhusker State, but Osborn is polling in a dead heat at 46.9%, according to Flipr, Nate Silver’s polling site, perhaps in part due to his refreshing perceived distance from the culture wars. He’s maintaining that distance — or the pretense of it — despite audio leaked this month from three separate private meetings that revealed him assuring progressives behind closed doors that he’s campaigning as a social conservative and border hawk only in order to win votes. 

I explain to Osborn that if gender identity is included as a protected category under Title IX, as was decreed by executive order by the Obama administration, though subsequently suspended by President Trump, it means biological boys in girls’ sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms. “I can’t see myself voting for that,” Osborn answers easily. “I don’t really understand it. I certainly don’t focus on that. I mean, as far as education concerns, that’s at the very bottom for me. We’ve got to teach civics in school. We should be teaching our kids finance.” 

Osborn is a 51-year-old Navy veteran who worked as an industrial mechanic for the Kellogg’s plant in Omaha, and became president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers Union Local 50G. He first appeared on the national political radar while leading a 77-day strike at Kellogg’s in 2021. Following that, he ran for Senate against incumbent Republican Deb Fischer in 2024 — and shocked the Beltway by winning 46.5% of the vote, despite getting very little attention from the chattering class.

Of the many red-state candidates Democrats have tried to promote in the Trump era, Osborn has long stood out as the most genuine. Unlike John Fetterman and Graham Platner, he actually is an Average Joe with no pedigree to speak of. Strategists are betting that the pros of being a regular guy will outweigh the cons of his lack of polish.

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In our discussion, Osborn quickly pivots to quality rather than ideology in education. “We are definitely falling behind,” he contends. “They had a record amount of people apply to be a plumber at the Union Plumbing Local 16 in Omaha, and over half the kids that applied failed the math test. I think that’s what we should be talking about.”

This is a savvy example of the balance Osborn needs to strike: agree with the Right on the underlying policy, but downplay its importance to remain palatable to the Left. Nobody else is doing it quite like he is, because he’s actually representative of the median Nebraskan independent voter, who is paying an average of $4.33 for a gallon of gas, isn’t supportive of the Iran War, and is unconvinced by socialism but is looking for some reprieve.  

These frustrations make 2026 fundamentally different from his failed campaign in 2024, Osborn says. Blanket tariffs, an unpassed farm bill, competition from Argentinian beef imports, and the war are major frustrations now bubbling up in conservative ag communities. “I’m starting to see a significant change in rural Nebraska,” he says, “specifically anybody that’s agriculture adjacent.” 

Such voters, he believes, will be responsive to the pitch he shares with me about punching a clock for 20 years, going to work “sick and sore … because that’s what you got to do for your family” and so on. “You know you’re always an injury away from going into the red,” he says. “It’s about being able to connect with the people throughout Nebraska who have the same shared experience through work, hard work.”

Such voters, however, also have plentiful reason to mistrust him. 

Incumbent Ricketts, a multimillionaire businessman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Daddy Warbucks, has successfully branded Osborn “Democrat Dan.” A national GOP operative with knowledge of the race explains Ricketts’s strategy this way: “the main point is always to get back to ‘Dan is a Democrat,’” for two reasons. First, “it’s true,” and second, because it calls attention to him being “wishy-washy” and “untrustworthy.”

On Sept. 1, Nebraska’s The Plains Sentinel published a report based on a leaked recording that showed Osborn pushing back on demands for him to go Left on trans sports. “The state is made up of 50% Republicans, 26% Democrat, and 24% Independents. So my win numbers, mathematically, I need to get 10% to 15% of Republicans to win this race…. How am I going to do that, by fucking saying, ‘Oh, I love trans people, and they should be able to play in sports?’”

Then Politico obtained audio of Osborn telling Democrats that Donald Trump’s border wall is “a symbol of racism” and “does nothing.”

“I knew the wall — it’s a joke. It’s a symbol of racism, really, is what the wall represents. It does nothing, you know,” Osborn told a questioner. Pressed further, he added, “There’s the campaigning side to get elected, and then there’s once you get into office, what are you going to do?” 

Shortly thereafter the Omaha World-Herald got its hands on another leaked recording. This time, Osborn appeared to be denigrating Trump voters. “Billy Bob in fucking Red Cloud, Nebraska, who lives next to the fucking Trump store as you pull into town and is waving the flag, all he knows is that he’s on the winning team,” Osborn said on the tape, later adding, “[Trump’s] been so effective at taking Billy Bob and his wife Mary Jane or Mary Jo and telling them … you’re on the winning team. And that’s all they care about, because their lives probably suck so fucking bad.” Team Ricketts immediately tried to frame the recording as Osborn’s “deplorables moment.” 

The GOP operative I spoke to said the sports recording is proof Osborn is a “fake independent.” 

“It blows up this whole narrative that he’s an independent guy who’s going to vote for Nebraska in the Senate,” the source said.

Republicans have a point on this. Osborn has run twice against GOP candidates, and was recruited into politics by high-profile progressives tied to Bernie Sanders. He’s been advised by political strategist Morris Katz, known for his work with Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner. Osborn’s campaign also received contributions from Democrats like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Montana Sen. Jon Tester. 

“I’d like to thank the banks, big tobacco, foreign lobbyists, and chemical manufacturers funding Ricketts’ campaign for not donating to mine…. The only money I accept is from those who support working people and are tired of the partisanship in Washington,” Osborn says, though he admits that it’s “frustrating” to explain this heavy support from the Left to voters who want to make sure he’s really independent. 

“I would love to see certainly more funding come in from the people who lean to the Right,” he tells me. “Actually, one of my biggest individual donors is a Republican business owner in Nebraska. Both he and his wife have double-maxed to the campaign on my stance on right to repair.”

“It’s not about Republican or Democrat,” he insists. “I happen to be running against a Republican. If I was in New York and I was running against a Democrat, most of my money would probably be coming from the Right.” Osborn argues that he’d be raising gargantuan sums like State Rep. James Talarico (D-Tex.), currently the Democratic nominee for Senate in the Lone Star State, and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), currently running for reelection, if he actually were a Democrat.

This is also true. Osborn’s $5.7 million cash haul pales in comparison to fundraising by Talarico and Ossoff, according to Open Secrets data. 

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Regardless of the gotcha tapes, there is still a lot of daylight between Osborn and the Democrats. On immigration, he says that we need reform that won’t “undercut American workers.” There isn’t a Democrat in the country that would lead off that way.

“I saw it firsthand at Kellogg’s when we went out on strike. They immediately tried to replace us and we had some very strong suspicions and some evidence that a lot of these folks were undocumented workers from Texas, and that shouldn’t happen,” he emphasizes. This, of course, is not the best way to rack up donations on ActBlue — if that’s your goal. Osborn mitigates his stance by describing himself as a “humanist” who believes “we’re all human beings just trying to get through our days in some semblance of peace.” 

“It’s just about having some dang common sense and not using this as a political football,” he says.

Such is the life of a Left-leaning independent trying to prove that the political elite can be toppled by a union mechanic in a state Trump won with 60% of the vote. Osborn clearly isn’t Mamdani and he clearly isn’t MAGA. That means he’s like a lot of Americans, a record number of whom — 45% — now identify as independents. 

Most people aren’t trying to decide whether they have the politics of Pete Ricketts or the politics of the Democratic Socialists of America. They’re trying to decide who’s going to bring down gas prices and healthcare costs while maintaining a sense of normalcy in the culture wars: no open borders, no boys in girls’ sports. 

When all is said and done, Osborn sounds like a guy who’s still trying to figure that out himself.  All while navigating the choppy waters of America’s expensive and messy electoral process. The leaked recordings don’t exactly reveal that Osborn is a secret Brooklyn barista so much as that he’s dealing with economic populists who also demand fealty on cultural issues. Unfortunately, it’s hard to say where Osborn stands on those issues apart from the reality that he’s clearly not a puritan and is clearly very frustrated.

So is he a relatable character torn between the divisive forces of corruption tearing American politics apart or a progressive sleeper cell trying to seduce MAGA into giving up a vote in the upper chamber? That’s for the voters of Nebraska to decide — and Osborn, too. 

Call it Progress, Inc.: a machine for advancing full-spectrum progressivism, using working-class aesthetics as a sort of skinsuit, if need be. What the party — and the nation — end up with are politicians who certainly look the part — sometimes connected to the traditional labor movement, comfortable in plaid, tossing a football or drinking beer — but whose substantive views are indistinguishable from those that prevail in places like Brooklyn and San Francisco. 

Consider Dan Osborn. Last week, Osborn, the former industrial mechanic and union leader running as an independent for the Senate from Nebraska, was caught on tape calling President Trump’s border wall “a symbol of racism,” and admitting that he only claimed to support it to woo Republican voters. This, needless to say, will likely hinder his ability to lure back the working class and create a path to victory. 

Osborn has been promoting himself as antiwar, pro-union, and for breaking up health care monopolies. At the same time, he has sought to portray himself as not woke and aligned with the working class on immigration (which is to say, in favor of restrictionism). He thus fits right into the sweet spot of politics these days: Left on economics, but moderate or conservative on culture and immigration. But if an independent running in Nebraska holds the same views on the border as the mainstream Democratic Party — can he really call himself an independent?

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It turns out, those behind Osborn are the same people behind Graham Platner, Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and many other Lefty and socialist candidates this cycle. All of these candidates are products of Progress, Inc. I once worked inside Progress, Inc. as a leading fundraiser for it before taking the measure of its disconnect with what working- and lower-middle-class Americans actually want. 

These behind-the-scenes operatives want to find people with “working-class costumes,” and “masculine images” — not leaders with actual working-class views. Graham Platner was the most obvious example. Before he was #MeToo’d out of the Maine Senate race, the scion of a prominent family checked all the right “image” boxes: bearded, tattooed, with a stint in the Marines under his belt. Another is El-Sayed, whose “bro energy,” his backers believe, is enough to attract disaffected men who’ve left the Democratic Party, with no need to change position on the actual issues that alienate men. Both, however, hold standard-issue ultra-progressive views when it comes to divisive identity politics, among other hot-button issues.

Working-class voters can see through the act. In Maine, Trumpy areas with factory economies tended to support his moderate Democratic opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, while Platner mainly won over the gentry Left. Likewise, El-Sayed has struggled with working-class black Americans, delivering his best performances in places like Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan.

These candidates’ views on the economy, to be sure, recall those of the old labor Left and the New Deal coalition. But they come laden with the cultural excesses of the modern Left. So far, they’ve mostly been unable to moderate Leftist positions on trans athletes in girls’ sports, immigration, and law and order, turning off working-class voters of all races. 

New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the rare exception. He reversed his previous #defund position on policing, retaining Gotham’s tough incumbent police commissioner and giving the NYPD a relatively wide berth to do its job. Most progressive candidates aren’t nearly as nimble. El-Sayed appeared on Fox News in August and stood firm on his unpopular cultural stances — trans sports, gender-affirming care for minors, slavery reparations. It was a missed opportunity to highlight his subtly socially conservative positions on widespread weed legalization, online porn, and gambling. 

Those who do dissent, like Amy Acton, a Democrat running for Ohio governor, face backlash from the Left. In any case, the dissenters tend to be Democrats in reddish or swing states who are establishment figures, wedded to the economic status quo, and thus facing their own flavor of electability crisis: they are unwilling to run on the bold populist economics that progressives embrace and that appeal to the working class, like universal health care.

Both wings of the party desperately need to compromise, but on different points. The progressives need to rein in cultural excesses, whereas the establishment needs to stop representing the wealthy donors who prevent it from holding populist positions.

Progress, Inc.’s mentality is not to compromise, but to push ideas into the mainstream until “they become popular.” This is what I was told firsthand by some colleagues while working inside progressive politics. The playbook, as I learned, is to go hard in midterm elections, then use that energy to get every presidential candidate in 2028 to run on Leftist causes. The strategy was learned from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, when she used her popularity and the energy behind her victory to push the Green New Deal, leading a whopping 10 democratic presidential candidates to embrace the idea in 2020.  

What groups make up Progress, Inc.? The Democratic Socialists of America have received the most attention, because they have the scary word “socialist” in their organization’s name. But there are many more players at work. For instance, there’s the Justice Democrats, a political group whose main focus over the past decade has been backing insurgent primary challengers. The group endorsed 13 candidates this cycle — and eight of them won their primaries. Former Justice Democrats operatives worked on the victorious campaign to elect Darializa Avila Chevalier as the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th Congressional District. The organization’s executive director, Alex Rojas, described how she recruited Chevalier to run for Congress during a podcast episode hosted by another Progress, Inc. group called Way to Win, a donor collective that boosts progressive candidates. Outside money unquestionably propels these candidates. 

Then there’s the group that advised Platner’s campaign: Daniel Moraff (who recruited both Platner and Osborn to run for US Senate) and Rebecca Katz and Morris Katz, co-founders of Fight Agency, all of whom are emblematic of Progress, Inc. Moraff is the grandson of the founder of Toys ’R’ Us, and Morris Katz, raised in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, is the son of a screenwriter father and children’s-book-author mother. When I was inside Progress, Inc., I worked with Rebecca Katz on a New York City district-attorney race. A fundraising firm where I served as a director worked with Morris Katz on a race in North Carolina in 2022. There’s also Left Rising, a fundraising firm, where I worked as a director, and Middle Seat, a huge small-dollar fundraising firm that has worked with nearly every Progress, Inc. candidate this cycle, among many others. What I saw was a total disconnect between those now steering the direction of the Democratic Party and the people it once stood for.

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Before Platner’s campaign imploded in July, Morris Katz was documented speaking to donors at the home of Tory Burch, where he was “holding court with roughly two dozen prominent guests about what he cast as a repeatable solution for Democrats,” according to Politico. He told the crowd, “We found a model here to win over working-class voters … a guy that looks like he’s a union working-class guy.”

This line of thinking was one of the main reasons I became exasperated with many of the people I knew when I worked inside Progress, Inc. 

Since 2019, I’ve witnessed this as the prevailing strategy, which I believe was born out of AOC’s upset win in 2018 and the creation of The Squad. Identity politics is such a deep, pathological undercurrent in the way they see themselves and the world; it would never occur to them to find candidates with actual working-class views. 

To be fair, I probably did the same thing when I was working in progressive politics. When you are inside of Progress, Inc., it is hard to see outside of it. You begin to parrot the people around you, thinking that it is you and your friends against the world. At times, I still sympathize with them. I have always supported people willing to challenge power structures, which, to the progressives’ credit, they do often.

Still, the movement’s thinking is fundamentally flawed. As I wrote in my recent book, Nothing Left, I first realized it over lunch at the “Dems Club” in DC, a private restaurant for Democratic politicians and their staff, where I was dining with two new co-workers. I believed we were there to represent working-class voters like my own mother and grandmother in Missouri. My co-workers wore Tory Burch dresses and talked about vacationing in Europe and Hawaii, while giggling about fighting for student-loan forgiveness on Capitol Hill. I felt profoundly alienated.

Many of the consultants inside Progress, Inc. are highly competent and talented people, including Morris Katz. They are a big part of the reason the Left is now so strong. But they are also part of the reason the Democratic Party won’t reconnect with working-class voters. The establishment has its own problems and is equally out of touch, but shouldn’t the anti-establishment be the solution to this problem, not adding to it?

Which brings us back to Osborn’s border crisis: I thought he represented the unique mix that could become the Democratic Party’s North Star — a bold outsider who leads on populist economics, while eschewing woke themes. While leading a union strike at Kellogg’s in 2022, Osborn even allegedly helped alert ICE when undocumented workers were being used as scabs. But winning back the working class, like Osborn’s candidacy seeks to do, can only be done by offering ideas that appeal to them — and that means championing their views on issues like immigration.

Neither wing of the Democratic Party is giving working-class voters what they really want. That leaves a huge constituency without a political home. Trump’s current doldrums may suffice to clinch the midterms for the Democrats. But that won’t resolve the party’s deeper contradictions.