NELIGH, Neb. — Melvin Woods has voted a straight Republican ballot for at least three decades.
But next month, the 77-year-old, who lives on a farm in northeastern Nebraska and supports former President Donald Trump, says he just might reject Republican Sen. Deb Fischer in favor of an unlikely choice: Navy veteran and union leader Dan Osborn, who’s running as an independent.
Woods stopped at a cafe along Route 275 Monday morning to hear Osborn speak. He left impressed, though he remains undecided. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know if he had been a Democrat, I wouldn’t have even come here,’’ Woods said.
Osborn is a machinist who has never held public office before and has no party apparatus to lean on. He is seeking to defeat Fischer, a two-term Republican incumbent, in a deep red state. What began as a long-shot quest has gained momentum. Osborn’s campaign has highlighted five internal polls that each showed him with a narrow edge, although all were within the margin of error. Fischer’s campaign released a survey last week indicating she had a 6-percentage-point lead, with 10 percent of voters undecided. There is no Democratic candidate.
Shifting dynamics
Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales recently moved the race to Likely Republican, suggesting it has become a tick more competitive than the Solid Republican rating it initially received. Osborn says his campaign brought in more than $3.2 million in the quarter that ended Tuesday, far outpacing Fischer, whose campaign said it raised less than $1 million over the past three months, though it has more than $1 million on hand heading into the final weeks.
Republicans, who initially viewed Osborn as an annoyance, appear to be taking the threat seriously and are spending money to get their message across. In ads dominating the Nebraska airwaves, they have sought to paint Osborn as a closet Democrat who is the ideological twin of Sen. Bernie Sanders, endorses the Green New Deal and wants to provide Social Security to undocumented immigrants.
Osborn made a name for himself leading a 2021 strike at the Kellogg’s cereal plant in Omaha. He is pitching himself to voters as a prairie populist, the political heir to fellow Nebraskan William Jennings Bryan, a newspaper editor and member of the House whose fiery speeches against the Eastern elites fueled his three runs for president more than a century ago.
“We keep electing millionaires and billionaires and nothing changes for us,’’ Osborn said during a swing through the conservative small towns that dot the sparsely populated north-central swath of the state. “That’s why I’m running as an independent. I get frustrated with the two-party system; I get frustrated with the divide and the polarization.”
His approach offers a roadmap for politicians seeking to capture working class and non-college-educated voters, who have increasingly gravitated to the Republican Party in the Trump era, said Nicholas F. Jacobs, an assistant professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, who has studied rural voters.
“The most important thing about this candidate is that he doesn’t label himself as a Democrat, and as a result, is within striking distance in Nebraska,’’ Jacobs said. “He’s showing another pathway of how to run without sacrificing his progressive principles.”
Blue dot phenomenon
A New York Times/Siena College poll in late September found Osborn leading Fischer in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, the so-called blue dot that includes Omaha and is home to the state’s lone competitive House contest.
But Osborn will have to win over at least some voters in the rural parts of the state as well. LuAnn Schindler, owner of the Summerland Advocate-Messenger newspaper in Clearwater, says there may be a path to victory for him. “There’s probably some really extreme MAGA people in this community,’’ said Schindler, a Democrat, as she waited for Osborn to speak here in Neligh. But, she added, “I kind of feel like there’s some momentum here.”
After all, Osborn’s stump speech about Washington political elites trying to squash the little guy isn’t that different from Trump’s rhetoric, she noted. “Deb Fischer has changed since she went to Washington…she’s part of the swamp that Trump always says he wants to drain.”
Republicans reject Osborn’s post-partisan populism. Fischer says Osborn’s stances on key issues are designed to fool voters and conceal a progressive agenda that’s out-of-step with the views held by the majority of Nebraskans.
“My opponent supports amnesty, Social Security for illegal immigrants, and has said he loves Bernie Sanders—he’s simply too far left for our state,’’ Fischer said in a statement. “Nebraskans support me because I’ve delivered results: from supporting border security and a strong national defense, to funding roads, bridges, and airports, to helping make life easier for working families through my paid family medical leave law, I have a long, conservative record that’s helped build Nebraska and keep America strong.”
Fischer has Trump’s endorsement, a valuable distinction in a state that Trump won by about 19 percentage points in 2020.
Osborn’s talk of income inequality, raising the federal minimum wage and corporate price-gouging made some conservative voters uncomfortable.
“I think he has more of a socialist bent…unions, free money and stuff like that,’’ said Grace Louis Coleman, a retiree who stopped in at an Osborn event in Atkinson. “I started out working for 10 cents an hour. I worked for every dime I’ve ever gotten and I’ve never taken any kind of help, so it’s a whole different world than what he’s looking at.”
Osborn’s politics don’t fit neatly into boxes. He backs tax cuts for the middle class, the legalization of medical cannabis, enhanced rail safety legislation and lower taxes on overtime wages. On two issues of intense importance to the Democratic base — gun safety and abortion access — his positions are more nuanced.
He’s “fundamentally in favor of the Second Amendment” and says “law-abiding citizens have, and must always have, the right to bear arms.” But ultimately Osborn said he’d defer to law enforcement on gun control measures. “If law enforcement wants bump stocks banned, then we should ban bump stocks because those are the guys that have to deal with it every single day,’’ he said. Fischer, by contrast, highlights her endorsement from the National Rifle Association and calls Osborn a “gun-grabbing liberal.”
On reproductive rights, Osborn, who is Roman Catholic, says he’s personally “100 percent pro-life” and “would never advocate my daughter or anyone I loved to have an abortion unless it was a case of assault.” But he also said he believes the decision should be left up to a woman and her doctor. Fischer has an A+ rating from Susan B. Anthony Pro Life America Candidate Fund, which called Osborn “a pro-abortion extremist.”
In a series of campaign appearances Monday, Osborn spoke extensively about a key policy concern: right-to-repair legislation on everything from farm equipment to personal electronics. He also vowed to support rail safety measures and expand labor rights. Foreign affairs were scarcely mentioned and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza never came up.
But immigration — an issue that has dominated the GOP’s advertising onslaught against Osborn — was at the forefront of voters’ minds.
Melvin Woods wanted to know what Osborn would do to address the “illegals” crossing the border.
Osborn agreed that the immigration system is “broken,” and he lays the blame on Congress. “They need to stop playing politics with it and we need to hold corporations accountable for their hiring practices,’’ he said. “We need stricter asylum laws but we also need more immigration judges and lawyers because there’s a lot of good people who want to come up here and work.”
Ultimately, his campaign has emphasized personality as much as policy. Wearing his working class roots as proudly as the faded flannel shirts he favors, Osborn claims that he’d be the only member of the Senate for whom the job’s $174,000 salary would constitute a pay raise.
He often boasts that he doesn’t accept corporate PAC money, though his campaign has received a boost of more than $3 million from a liberal super PAC, Retire Career Politicians, and last week, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the actress who starred in HBO’s “Veep,” held a tele-fundraiser for him.
Osborn has portrayed Fischer as an out-of-touch D.C. insider who hasn’t delivered for the state. He notes that she has reneged on her long-standing pledge to serve just two terms in the Senate. (Fischer said term limits only work when applied to everyone. “That’s not the case in the U.S. Senate,’’ she said. “Until that changes, I plan to use my seniority to keep bringing home big wins for our state.”)
Defining independent
But it’s unclear how effective Osborn would be. He has pledged to be a true independent, even rebuffing a question from a voter about whether he plans to vote for Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.
“As soon as I say who I’m voting for, I put myself in a box. I want to work for the people of Nebraska, so if Trump gets elected, I’ll be happy to work with Trump.”
Charting your own course in an institution as tradition-bound as the Senate can be difficult. There are four independents currently serving — Sanders, Angus King of Maine, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — but all caucus with Democrats. Osborn says he’ll create an “independent caucus” instead of caucusing with either party.
“I’m under no delusion,’’ he said. “We didn’t get to where we are overnight. I don’t think I’m going to get in there and be a maverick and a year later I’ll come back here and be like, ‘Everything’s great.’ I’m going to figure it out … It’s going to take a little bit of time.”
But, as he told voters in a coffee shop in O’Neill, the stakes couldn’t be higher. “Imagine the ramifications if Nebraska elects an independent candidate. The rest of the country is going to say, ‘Holy crap, did you see what Nebraska did?’”
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