Dan Osborn, a labor leader and mechanic who is running as an independent, is making Republicans sweat with his dark horse bid to oust Senator Deb Fischer. Can he turn the buzz into votes?
Dan Osborn’s dark-horse, grass-roots campaign has transformed what was expected to be a sleepy Senate race into a late-breaking and high-stakes clash.
At a recent series of campaign stops in small-town Nebraska, Dan Osborn, the little-known labor leader and car mechanic who is running for Senate as an independent, made his pitch to voters in the form of an allegory about the mice who elect cats to represent them.
As Mr. Osborn tells it, the mice keep voting for different breeds of cats in the hope that one will make good on their promises to make things better, but none ever do. Eventually, the mice realize that their real problem is not which cat they elect — it’s that they keep electing cats in the first place.
“We have to stop electing cats,” Mr. Osborn told about 50 supporters who had gathered in his campaign’s new field office in downtown Kearney on a recent Sunday afternoon, one of four opened weeks before Election Day as part of a last-minute campaign sprint. “We are ruled by the millionaire and billionaire class that are inoculated from the very laws that they make.”
The populist appeal — in which members of both major political parties are cast as feline villains and Mr. Osborn as one of the preyed-upon rodents — has helped propel his challenge to Senator Deb Fischer, a second-term Republican who until recently had appeared to be on a glide path to re-election. Now, polls show the two in a tightening race that could potentially sway the balance of power in the Senate.
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Mr. Osborn’s campaign office in Grand Island, Neb., one of four opened weeks before Election Day as part of a last-minute sprint.Credit…Michael Ciaglo for The New York Times
Over the past two decades, Republicans have consolidated a near monopoly in the Great Plains, a shift across a stretch of prairie once dominated by Democrats that could become complete in November if Senator Jon Tester of Montana loses his seat.
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Source: nytimes.com
