Scoop: Populist Dan Osborn will run for office again

The independent union leader from Nebraska has some big plans

Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.

Now that our long weekend of national holidays have concluded with Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday, it’s time to get back to the real world. For me, that means finishing up a big national scoop tomorrow and then having a procedure on my heart on Thursday; my goal is to get a news deep dive newsletter out to paid subscribers tomorrow night, but if that doesn’t happen, it’ll come over the weekend. Either way, we’ll be good to go from that point forward.

Tonight we’ve got a timely interview with Dan Osborn, who reflects on what he learned from his underdog Senate campaign, discusses the power of working class candidates, and makes some big news.

Note: This is going to be a long four years — and perhaps much longer, if Donald Trump and his newly empowered Republican Party accomplish their goals.

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Liberation: After 13 long years, Wisconsin public sector workers will have the right to collectively bargain for a contract once again. A Dane County judge has overturned Act 10, the infamous anti-union law passed by Republicans in 2011 and signed by former Gov. Scott Walker.

The law, which took away public employees’ ability to bargain with the state and local governments over wages and other issues, applied to teachers and other civil servants but carved out an unconstitutional exemption for police, firefighter, and other public safety unions. If liberals can keep their 4-3 advantage on the state Supreme Court this coming spring, the law should be toast.

High stakes: The US Supreme Court will hear US v. Skrmetti, a challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. It’s a high-stakes case, and in front of this Supreme Court, it is even more worrisome. But as Chris Geidner at Law Dork argues, this is probably the best case scenario that trans rights advocates could have feasibly hoped for, given all that’s to come.

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In search of more Working Class Heroes

It doesn’t take long for it to become obvious that despite having spent the past year running for Senate, Dan Osborn is still anything but a typical politician.

The first clue — beyond the fact that we were talking after his shift as a union steamfitter — comes when I ask how he’s doing after his far-closer-than-expected loss to Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer. “I'm done with my pity party and my brief stint into alcoholism after November 5th, and I'm back to 100 percent,” Osborn says with a laugh.

It’s a joke, but not one most politicians would make. And he wasn’t being glib — Osborn, a longtime union leader who ran an independent populist campaign against the Republican senator, says he spent four sleepless nights thinking about all the things that he could have done differently.

And here’s another clue that Osborn isn’t your typical politician: When asked whether he plans on running again, he doesn’t dodge the question.

“Yeah, I’ve got another one in me,” Osborn flatly admits to me, forgoing the usual equivocation that follows tough election losses. He thrives in the “chaos” of a campaign, he says, something he first discovered while leading BCTGM’s Omaha local during the strike on Kellogg’s in 2021.

Next time, he won’t have the benefit of coming out of nowhere — “being able to fly under the radar for a while with no name recognition was certainly advantageous” — but the trade-off is that Osborn will have the foundation of a campaign assembled and ready for whenever he decides to pick it back up.

But before that happens, Osborn aims to share what he learned about campaigning with other working class people interested in running for office.

Running as a working class hero

A few weeks ago, Osborn announced the launch of the Working Class Heroes Fund, a PAC that he will use to support wage-earning candidates. There’s no exact litmus test or definition for “working class,” but he’s looking for the kind of people who “know what it's like to put Christmas on a credit card and haven’t their way paid for them their whole lives,” he says.

“People that know what it's like to put in 70 hours a week to make ends meet for their families, they’re going to legislate the same way,” he explains. “They're going to be hard workers. They're going to think of people first.”

There’s data to back up Osborn’s personal experience: a new study found that found that working class respondents were more 6.4 percent more likely to choose a candidate with a working class job than one with an upper class job.

“Voters value candidate class beyond what they might infer about candidates’ policy preferences or rhetorical appeals from their class background,” Jared Abbott and Fred DeVeaux, political science professors at Cal State and UCLA, wrote in a paper published in September. “Instead, working-class respondents prefer working-class candidates because they perceive them as ‘better understand[ing] problems facing people like me.’”

That it required an academic study to make that discovery is indicative of how exceedingly rare it is for people to have that choice In the real world.

Seeking elected office is never easy, but most people who do it either have some kind of financial backstop or very low personal overhead. Another study released earlier this year found that just 1.6 percent of state legislators across all 50 states are either currently or were most recently employed in working class jobs.

“It's hard for everybody to run for office, but if you're a working class person, you are likely facing a lot more personal precarity than an equally qualified person who has a white collar job,” Nicholas Carnes, a political science professor at Duke University and one of the study’s co-authors, told me.

“Parties and interest groups, they’re at a disadvantage if they want to recruit a working class person,” Carnes added. “If your job is just to get Democrats elected or get Republicans elected, as long as the person has the right positions, then you want to actually find the person who has the easiest time.”

As fewer and fewer working and even middle class people serve in elected office, what party leaders consider the “right” positions continue to drift away from what regular Americans want to see from their government.

Osborn, who is married with three children, had perhaps the hardest possible path to a viable campaign, and found his experience far different than more typical candidates. Whereas parties tend to recruit self-funding small business owners or law firm partners who can take a leave of absence without missing a paycheck, he simply had two work jobs.

This union leader wants to flip a red state with populism

After announcing his candidacy in September of 2023, Osborn spent the subsequent six months pulling double duty, working as a steamfitter during the day before returning home to spend late nights on the campaign. There were times that he found himself working up to 90 hours per week.

Eight months into the campaign, a new FEC rule allowed him to draw a monthly salary that covered lost pay — he makes $48,000 a year as a steamfitter — and COBRA health insurance, which he’s now paying for himself. His wife had to continue working to keep the lights on at home.

While far more ideologically simpatico with Democrats, Osborn ran as an independent, which was part of why he fared 14 points better than Kamala Harris on Election Day. His PAC will go one step further; Osborn says the Working Class Heroes Fund will help Democrats, independents, and even Republicans, so long as they support union rights and refuse to accept corporate donations — which, editorializing for a moment here, makes it unlikely that many Republicans will wind up taking him up on the offer.

“It’s a grind,” Osborn says of trying to launch a campaign based in large part on an opposition to corporate money in politics. “It's calling your buddy Steve from high school and seeing if he can throw you 20 bucks. People like me don't have a rich set of friends. We might know one person that's got money. It was starting out with angel investors and friends and family throwing you a few bucks to get you to the next rung.”

Lessons learned

Things began to get slightly easier for Osborn when his campaign released some internal polling in December that showed him running far closer to Fischer than anyone would have anticipated. It opened some doors, earned him more conversations, and allowed him to connect with voters that otherwise wouldn’t have paid attention.

Once that happened, the lack of wealthy connections — “I didn’t talk to many investment bankers,” Osborn says, laughing — proved to be something of a benefit, at least for a while.

Despite President Biden’s historic prioritization of union rights during his time in the White House, Democrats continue to bleed support from working class voters, who have flocked to Republicans en masse since Donald Trump first ran for president. They have been accused in many cases of being elitist and aloof, traits that Osborn expressly sought to avoid.

“I just ran a campaign that was real to me and my experiences and tried not to sugarcoat things, just be a real person that has dealt with a lot of the exact same issues that other people have,” he explains. “When people asked me a question, I answered it.”

By the fall, polling still had Osborn tied with or trailing Fischer by just a few points. It was at that point that Republicans began pouring money to bolster the less-than-popular incumbent. Several GOP Super PACs, including Mitch McConnell’s Senate Majority Fund, spent millions of dollars on TV ads that hammered Osborn as a secret liberal who did not adhere to Nebraska's values.

It was ironic, given that Osborn made a splash with ads that criticized Fischer for her immense support from corporate donors, but the Republican bombardment was just too much to overcome, especially in such a Republican year.

“At the end of the day, she won on awful lies; she painted me to be somebody that I'm not and people believed it because that was the information that they received,” Osborn reflects, citing ads that falsely asserted that he wanted to give Social Security benefits to undocumented immigrants. “That's what's so disgusting about our politics: You can just publicly lie about somebody, and there's no referee to throw a flag, no repercussions for slander and libel.”

Building for the future

This is the duality of running a populist campaign that rejects politics as usual: People gravitate toward authenticity, but are swayed by the most superficial forms of persuasion. Osborn can point to strategic miscalculations — “I would probably focus more on the I-80 corridor instead of branching out into the smaller towns,” he says, reluctantly admitting that he should have spent more time around Lincoln and Omaha instead of deep red country — but the issue is really structural in nature.

With the average net worth of a US senator climbing well over $1 million even before ultra-wealthy Republicans Bernie Moreno and Dave McCormick are sworn in, even attempting to help blue collar workers run is a radical act.

That’s where the Working Class Heroes Fund comes in.

While focused on fundraising at the moment, Osborn envisions an operation that recruits, trains, and backs working class candidates, something that is all too rare right now. Unions have historically supported Democratic candidates with financial contributions and GOTV efforts, but refrained from running their own electoral programs.

One exception is in New Jersey, where the state AFL-CIO runs a successful candidate school that Osborn sees as one of several models for what he’s envisioning. His own work at BCTGM and Kellogg’s, where he built an apprentice program for factory workers, will also help inform the Working Class Heroes Fund’s infrastructure.

“It was all about bringing people who stood out as more mechanically inclined from the operations floor, and then going and teaching them how to be a mechanic, versus just hiring somebody off the street and you don't know who you're getting,” he explains. “I want to do the same thing with this eventually, like an apprenticeship program for politics, getting people off the shop floor and training them on how to run a campaign.”

There is an important lesson here, if political power brokers are willing to listen. Democrats try to sort out their future, both in terms of who will lead the party and what it will represent, they’re going to spend a lot of time focused on how to reach working class voters. Working on slogans and campaign rhetoric can’t hurt, but as Osborn’s campaign showed, they might be better served focusing less on contrived messaging and more on finding authentic messengers.

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