(AFP) – At a cafe in the small Nebraska town of Arapahoe, a handful of residents listen to Dan Osborn, a 51-year-old Navy veteran running as an independent for the US Senate. The industrial mechanic and former union leader is a relative political novice, and says he’s always refused to define himself along party lines. “We’re in this forever power struggle between the left versus the right, but I say it all the time: we have to shed those red and blue jerseys,” Osborn told AFP.
Nevertheless, he is one of the Democratic Party’s biggest hopes for the midterm elections on November 3. “We’re uniting behind Dan Osborn: a true working-class Nebraskan who knows how to work a wrench and served our country in uniform,” Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, said in a statement this month. The Great Plains state, home to two million people, is not exactly an easy get for Democrats. The party opted not to even field a candidate in the race against the Republican incumbent, Senator Pete Ricketts, to improve Osborn’s odds of winning.
Osborn ran unsuccessfully two years ago for the state’s other Senate seat, winning nearly 47 percent of the vote against Republican Deb Fischer — impressive given that Donald Trump won almost 60 percent of the votes in the presidential contest. The strategy Democrats are using in Nebraska — to bank on a popular independent to boost a more moderate candidate’s chances — is one they are also adopting in Idaho and South Dakota, two other traditionally red states easily won by Trump in 2024.
– ’40 trillion reasons’ – Not fielding a party candidate was the right move by Democrats to “strengthen” Osborn’s run, according to longtime party supporter Mary Haller, a 66-year-old retired physician assistant who came to hear the independent speak at the cafe in Arapahoe. Osborn refuses to be shoehorned into any political silos and is no fan of the two-party system. He is bemused by Ricketts’s attempts to paint him as a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat.
“There’s 40 trillion reasons why I would agree with a fiscal conservative,” Osborn said, referring to the staggering US national debt, which recently passed the $40 trillion mark. “We’ve got to do better with spending,” he said. “We solve it with making people pay their fair share. I have multinational corporations that are based here that funnel their profits overseas.” In 2021, when Osborn was still working as a mechanic at a Kellogg’s plant and leading the local food workers’ union, he helped lead a 77-day strike against the US cereal giant. “That was definitely a defining moment in my life,” he recalled. “To understand one day that you think you’re important to somebody, and then all of a sudden you’re not. They discard you like a piece of garbage.”
Running for Senate, Osborn said, “is a way for me to give the power back to the people.”
– ‘Balanced system’ – Matt Biehl, a 45-year-old cattle rancher, came from the village of Johnson Lake to hear Osborn, just weeks before the election. Biehl described himself as a “classic Republican — more of your George Bush era type.” He told AFP he hopes that Americans can somehow rediscover a “balanced system of people that are willing to reach across the party aisle” so that compromise is no longer a “bad word.” This is the sweet spot Osborn is targeting: he hopes to ultimately bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats in the US Senate.
Not far from the cafe where Osborn met with voters, Calvin Pemberton owns a Trump souvenir shop next to his car detailing business, where he sells flags, t-shirts, and hats with the Republican president’s likeness. Osborn chatted with Pemberton, who said he remains undecided how he will vote in November. “If there’s ever a candidate that I feel is worth voting for, I’ll vote the direction I feel my morals are pulling me,” said Pemberton. That is just the kind of voter that Osborn will need to win over in order to claim a seat in Washington.
– Robin LEGRAND
© 2024 AFP
