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.
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.
But this year, Nebraska has thrown Republicans for a loop. Mr. Osborn’s dark-horse, grass-roots campaign has transformed what was expected to be a sleepy race into a late-breaking and high-stakes clash that has forced Ms. Fischer and her allies to invest millions of dollars to avoid an upset.
In the Omaha suburbs, one of Republicans’ most battle-tested incumbents in Congress, Representative Don Bacon, is facing stiff headwinds, thanks to his party’s lurch to the right and his recent endorsement of eliminating a provision that awards an electoral vote to the party that wins his district. The result has been an influx of cash into Mr. Bacon’s increasingly liberal district, leaving him in an uphill fight for political survival.
In the Senate contest, Mr. Osborn is tapping into a well of discontent with Congress and leaning on his status as a political newcomer and his background as a union laborer to appeal to working-class voters from across the political spectrum. He has eschewed any connection with Democrats, rejecting an endorsement from the Nebraska Democratic Party this year and insisting that he would not caucus with either party if elected.
That has not stopped Ms. Fischer from labeling him as a “Democrat in disguise.” Mr. Osborn’s deep experience in the labor movement — he is best known for leading 500 of his workers out of a Kellogg’s cereal plant in Omaha and onto a picket line — and his support for codifying abortion rights into federal law seem to indicate that he would side with Democrats on at least some major economic and social issues.
Still, Mr. Osborn appears to be drawing interest among voters of different political stripes. At recent events, several attendees said they planned to vote for former President Donald J. Trump, and a few indicated they were supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Ms. Fischer, a former school board member and state lawmaker whose family owns a cattle ranch, won both of her previous Senate races by double-digit margins and has kept a relatively low profile since taking office. She has voted multiple times to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Soon after taking office in 2013, she cosponsored the Life at Conception Act, which would have effectively outlawed all abortions without exception and aspects of certain fertility treatments, such as in vitro fertilization. Ms. Fischer, who praises the overturning of Roe v. Wade, has said in recent weeks that she would support exceptions to an abortion ban for cases of rape and incest and to protect the life of the mother.
Mr. Osborn, who enlisted in the Navy after high school and served in the Nebraska Army National Guard, has pitched himself as a consensus-builder across party lines. At his recent events, he described how he tried to make the Kellogg’s strike a nonpartisan issue by persuading Mr. Bacon to walk the picket line with the workers and Pete Ricketts, the governor at the time, to write a letter to company executives urging them to make a deal. (Mr. Ricketts, a Republican and now Nebraska’s junior senator, is expected to handily win a special election and retain the seat he was appointed to in 2023 after Senator Ben Sasse resigned.)
“I didn’t see men or women, or Black or white, or Republican or Democrat out on the picket line,” said Mr. Osborn, who was recruited to run by railroad unions in western Nebraska that turned against Ms. Fischer because of her backing for legislation that is favorable to the rail industry. “I just saw people that wanted to go to work for a fair wage and fair benefits.”
When he jumped into the political fray last September, Mr. Osborn had little name recognition and even less money, and pundits and the news media had largely written off the race. But funding is no longer a barrier; his campaign hauled in close to $3.3 million last quarter and spent nearly all of it on advertising, according to federal filings.
As polls have shown Mr. Osborn closing the gap, Ms. Fischer and her Republican allies have been forced to pour millions of their own into the race. Two recent nonaffiliated surveys showed Mr. Osborn within a few points of Ms. Fischer. The Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, on Monday promised an additional $3 million in ad spending in the final two weeks before the election.
Ms. Fischer’s campaign has called Mr. Osborn “simply too far left” and is running multiple ads that quote him saying that he “loves” Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent known for his progressive policies. (According to audio circulated by Republicans, Mr. Osborn apparently made the remark as a point of contrast as he discussed the need to appeal to conservatives.)
“Nebraskans support me because I’ve delivered results,” Ms. Fischer, whose campaign did not respond to a request for an interview, said in a statement. “I have a long, conservative record that’s helped build Nebraska and keep America strong.”
Some of the Republican attacks on Mr. Osborn appear to be resonating with voters. Peter Rishel, a retired police officer who attended his event in Kearney, asked whether it was true that Ms. Osborn wanted to give Social Security cards to illegal migrants, a claim made in several of Ms. Fischer’s ads.
Mr. Osborn chuckled before bluntly declaring that, no, he does not want “amnesty” for “people who come here unlawfully,” nor does he want to give them Social Security benefits. He then criticized Ms. Fischer for voting twice against the bipartisan border bill led by Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, at the behest of Mr. Trump.
Mr. Rishel, who said he planned to vote for Mr. Trump, left the event intrigued by Mr. Osborn, who he said gave a “pretty impressive” pitch for how he would take on Washington elites. But Ms. Rishel said he was reluctant to vote against Ms. Fischer, whose office helped him and his wife navigate a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over their income tax refund.
“I just thought the world of her when she helped us,” Mr. Rishel said. “And to step away from that — God, that’s a pretty big step.”
Abortion could also play a role in the race. Nebraska voters face two competing ballot measures this year that would alter the state’s abortion law, which bans the procedure at 12 weeks with exceptions for rape and incest and to protect the life of the mother. One of the proposals, which has garnered national support and funding from abortion rights groups, would enshrine the rights in the state Constitution up to the point of viability. The other would add a 14-week ban to Nebraska’s Constitution.
During a swing through small towns in western Nebraska on a recent Sunday afternoon, after several voters asked for his stance, Mr. Osborn said he supported codifying the protections of Roe v. Wade into federal law.
“I don’t believe it’s my place or the government’s place to tell people when they should or shouldn’t start families, and that includes I.V.F. and contraceptives,” Mr. Osborn told the crowd at his newly opened office in Grand Island.
Earlier that day, in response to a similar question from a voter in Hastings, Mr. Osborn said: “Bottom line is, since Roe’s been overturned, women are dying. And I’ve got a problem with that.”
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