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. 

In a period of intense creativity, Springsteen wrote hundreds of songs for a much-anticipated follow-up. Intending to teach them to his band, he recorded them on a simple four-track tape machine in his New Jersey bedroom. Subsequent sessions in the studio could not replicate the intensity of these demos. They were too personal, immediate: the words often mumbled so softly they were barely discernible; the rhythm of the guitar-playing often broken. But rather than re-record these tapes himself, Springsteen released them, as Nebraska.

Everything about the album went against the spirit of the times. Ronald Reagan was two years into his first term after the Republicans swept the working-class heartlands of America in a landslide victory. The president believed storybook myths about his country: that its fortunes had been made by pioneering men and women on the western frontier, free from the restraining hand of the federal government. Reagan’s America was like the cowboy B-movies in which he had once starred: a land of heroes, opportunity, and sunny Hollywood optimism.

Nebraska was not optimistic. Its cover sleeve depicts a bleak sky, above a road to nowhere, ice on the windshield and, beneath it, the title in red, like a warning sign. It sold poorly and due to its troubling themes, Springsteen did not take it on tour. Nebraska was left to speak for itself. Today, exactly 40 years after its release, that voice is no less disquieting. Its characters are mostly out-of-work men, driven to the edge of madness, and sometimes beyond it, by poverty and despair. They commit petty acts of crime to make ends meet, or sometimes shocking acts of depravity.

The album’s opener, for instance, tells a fictionalised account of the crimes of Charles Starkweather, a 19-year-old carpenter’s son who took his 14-year-old girlfriend on a killing spree around rural Nebraska in 1959. “I can’t say I’m sorry for the things we done,” reflects Springsteen’s Starkweather character, “at least for a while, sir, me and her we had us some fun.”

On Nebraska, Springsteen’s characters all speak in this idiomatic, first-person style, punctuated with “sirs” and “misters”. They speak in parables, of gleaming mansions on hills, of lost sons returning to fathers, of family loyalty chosen over duty. The economy of language owes much to the influence of Flannery O’Connor, the writer of Southern Gothic fiction, in whose profoundly Catholic vision grace is often found in moments of shocking violence. “She got to the heart of some meanness that she never spelled out,” Springsteen has said, inspired to create characters of his own. Her work, he later reflected, reminded him of the “unknowability of God”.

Matters of the soul were on Springsteen’s mind. He was 33 and mired in depression. It was an affliction that ran deep among the Springsteens, working-class Italian-Irish Catholics from Freehold, New Jersey. Bruce’s father was a brooding, sometimes violent alcoholic, who traded various blue-collar jobs. Nebraska is Springsteen’s most personal album, written for the kitchen in which his father drank; for the “flat, dead voice” that drifted through his town on sleepless nights; for his grandparents’ sparse living room, frozen in time, ornamented by a picture of his father’s sister, killed as a child in a bicycle accident.

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Springsteen grew up introspective with few friends or prospects. Music, to which he devoted his life, offered salvation. Greetings from Asbury Park, his first album, is about the hot summer streets and beaches of New Jersey; Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town reflect dreams of escape; while on The River, Springsteen begins to explore working-class lives and problems. It is on Nebraska, however, that these themes reach full maturity. It is the moment he steps into his father’s clothes and channels the working-class consciousness of America.

It was Springsteen’s preternatural artistic gift that his own depression offered a way to explore his country’s, which, by the early Eighties, had grown acute. Between 1945 and 1973, the average American family income almost doubled. In the factories of the Midwest, rising wages meant harmony between unions and management. Blue-collar workers reaped the fruits of their labour. They bought houses, cars, and household goods once considered luxuries reserved for the privileged few.

However, by the mid-Seventies, a combination of sluggish economic growth and high inflation brought this period of relative prosperity to an end. The Reagan government prescribed a shock therapy of tax cuts and deregulation. Unemployment reached 10.8%, a postwar record. High interest rates led to home repossessions. The factories of the Midwest began to rust. The result was the hollowing out of small towns, the breakdown of families, and diseases of addiction and despair.

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It is into these broken lives that Nebraska casts us. “Down here it’s just winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line,” says one character, bound for Atlantic City, the promised land. But so often Springsteen’s characters are caught on the wrong side, like the worker who loses his job at an auto-plant and murders a store clerk. “Now I ain’t sayin’ that makes me an innocent man,” he tells the judge. “But it was more ‘n this that put that gun in my hand.”

Nebraska is a place where fates are decided, where confessions are made, where redemption is sought. A driver begs a late-night radio DJ to hear his prayers, a highway patrolman drives down to the crossroads, an out-of-work man agrees to do an unspeakable favour. These men are haunted by the past. Ghostly voices rise from moonlit fields. Radios are jammed up with “lost souls callin’ long distance salvation”. A bar band sings “The Night of the Johnstown Flood” — not a song, but a tragedy, which claimed the lives of 2,000 Americans in the late 19th century.

And Nebraska becomes not a state, but a state of being: a purgatory of perpetual darkness where its characters are condemned to the horror of eternal recurrence. Whether there is any escape from the bardo is not clear. A character dreams of his “father’s house”, which stands “hard and bright” across a dark highway, visible, but out of reach. The album ends with the optimistic line: “every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe”. But the song is about lives of quiet desperation and pain.

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In the early Nineties, doctors discovered millions of Americans were suffering from a mysterious pain. The pain was especially acute in the Nebraska of Springsteen’s imagination: the desolate farms and villages, the hollowed-out factory towns. Doctors did not know its source, but there were many causes. Since the Seventies, the wages of white working-class men not only flattened, but declined. As factories shuttered, trade union membership collapsed. Marriage and fertility rates fell much faster than the rest of America. Church attendance fell too. And while the American crime rate has decreased since the Nineties, in the Rust Belt it remained persistently high. Bereft of hope, men and women in these godforsaken places fell victim to diseases of despair: drug addiction, alcohol abuse, suicide.

Then, in the mid-Nineties, a solution for the pain was found: painkillers. Because the pain could not be treated at source, it was numbed. Opioids were prescribed to millions of Americans. Big Pharma companies grew rich, while patients were immiserated. Because patients developed a tolerance to the drugs, they turned to alternatives bought on the street, some 100 times stronger than morphine. Between 1999 and 2017, the death rate in overdoses from opioids increased fivefold. But the pain remains. And the economic conditions — high inflation, high interest rates, low growth — that were among its causes, have returned. The American heartlands of 2022 are no less a likeness of Springsteen’s Nebraska than they were in 1982.

It is these abandoned heartlands Nebraska still speaks for. It speaks for their dead, too, many of whom, awaiting final judgement, are trapped there, between this world and the next.