Politics

Dan Osborn is looking for 'working-class heroes' to shake up U.S. politics

Published

1 year ago

February 16, 2025

Dan Osborn is looking for 'working-class heroes' to shake up U.S. politics

Omaha, NE — Dan Osborn, a mechanic by trade, has been rebuilding a 1988 Pontiac Firebird in his garage. He plans to drop in a fuel-injected V-8 engine at some point, but these days Osborn, whose tattoos tend toward the nautical, is spending much of his time trying to convince working-class candidates to break into politics.

He looked at the car, covered in dust, upholstery torn.

“I’m working on it with my son,” he said. “It’ll get done one day.”

Osborn became a political surprise last year when he ran for the U.S. Senate as an independent in Nebraska and lost a close race to Republican incumbent Deb Fischer. If he had won, it could have narrowed the balance of power in Congress and complicated President Trump’s agenda.

His mechanic versus the well-monied career politician narrative inspired his new Working Class Heroes Fund, a political action committee that has raised about $500,000 in donations since November to train unions to recruit and support local and national candidates. They include an electrician running for the Wisconsin state legislature and a Marine combat veteran and mechanic challenging Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), whose vote was key in confirming Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.

Dan Osborn, center, speaks at an election night watch party on Nov. 5.

(Bonnie Ryan / Associated Press)

“We want to give working-class people a seat at the table,” said Osborn, 49, who in 2021 led hundreds of his fellow union members on a 77-day strike against the Kellogg cereal plant in Omaha. “We’re about to have our first trillionaire in this country. I was blown away: $50 trillion since 1980 has migrated from 90% of Americans to the top half of 1%. The super-uber wealthy class is taking advantage and they’re doing it through our elected officials.”

Osborn’s appeal is an everyman’s plainspokenness tuned into the anger and disenchantment not only of the Midwest factory worker and farmer but of the Silicon Valley gig worker, the Hollywood tradesperson and the Las Vegas waitress: “I don’t call it economic populism. I call it paycheck populism,” he said. “That’s what makes sense to me. The economy is a huge thing. I can’t pin what that means. But I know what a paycheck is. I live week to week on it. And it’s not stretching as far.”

The test his movement faces — he may run against wealthy Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts in 2026 — is winning over disgruntled Democrats and making deeper inroads into Trump’s base. Osborn favors workers’ rights and higher corporate taxes but leans conservative on immigration and China. He won 20% of Trump voters in his Senate race.

Support for his brand of politician could rise as the president moves to cut social programs and splits widen in the Republican Party between tech billionaire backers like Elon Musk and those like Vice President JD Vance, who has emphasized the concerns of the working class.

Dan Osborn sits in his garage beside a 1988 Pontiac Firebird.

“Dan was able to break through,” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party. “He can walk into a bar or a union hall in a Carhartt jacket because that’s who he is. He has a very authentic connection to Nebraskans. Voters want people like Dan to represent them, more teachers, union leaders and cops. He shook things up for both parties.”

Danny Begley met Osborn when he handed out sandwiches and firewood along picket lines during the Kellogg strike. A member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and an Omaha city councilman, Begley said Osborn “stood up to corporations and became a Rocky Balboa long shot against a powerful senator. He’s transformational. He’s not [programmed] to say what some think tank in Washington, D.C., says. He says what he believes in, and that matters in post-pandemic America.”

On a recent day, as a winter dusk settled over fields behind his house, Osborn sat in his living room, wearing jeans, a flannel shirt and work boots. His wife, Megan, and their daughters — Georgia and Eve — were in the kitchen making salad and lasagna.

“It’s boyfriend night,” said Osborn, nodding toward the young man dating Georgia, a dancer who had recently returned home from Los Angeles. He listened to the chatter and recalled an evening not too many years ago when he and Megan were doing their taxes and discovered the consequences of his working a lot of Sunday double-shifts at Kellogg.

“I paid $30,000 in taxes that year, but then we found we owed another $10,000 because the overtime kicked us into a higher bracket,” said Osborn, who now works as a steamfitter at a mechanical firm. “Megan was sitting there crying in the kitchen. I was so mad, so angry at my government. How are you supposed to get ahead?”

A dog barked. Voices drifted in and out of the kitchen. Dinner was almost ready, and Eve, a high school junior, had to go upstairs soon to do homework. There was an empty place at the table for his son Liam, who was away at college studying aviation. Bread was cut and the scent of garlic and tomato lifted in the oven air.

The son of a railroad man and a seamstress, Osborn’s life is a portrait of a large swath of America: He played basketball in high school, bused tables and did a stint in the Navy, where he worked the flight deck on the USS Constellation (“she’s scrap metal now”). He joined the National Guard, enrolled at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, dropped out when Megan got pregnant, and went to work at Kellogg, where he carried a union card and wondered about what would come next.

While Osborn’s family grew, the nation’s politics shifted. Many Democrats embraced identity politics and Republicans fell in line with Donald Trump’s reinvention of the party with nationalist populism that spoke to working-class grievances against globalization and immigration. Osborn, like millions of others, including 300,000 independents in Nebraska, does not feel kinship with either camp, but his populist sentiments are not as extreme as those of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former advisor who blames tech oligarchs for destroying America.

Osborn lost to Fischer by about seven percentage points, but his candidacy showed what a political outsider in a polarized nation could accomplish.

“It was rough early in the campaign with grassroots field operations,” said Evan Schmeits, who managed Osborn’s campaign last year. “We were independent. No party backing. We went into these forgotten rural areas. We were able to get a lot of Trump voters because we concentrated on economic issues. We did well in the suburbs too. We were bringing people together in this era of divisiveness.”

Fischer and Republicans paid little mind to Osborn in the early days of the campaign. That changed when polls showed a tightening race and Osborn raised more than $30 million, catching the attention not only of the working class but of organizations such as the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans seeking an equitable economy.

Hollywood also took notice. Producer Tom Ortenberg, whose company distibuted “The Apprentice” biopic about Trump, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played a fictional vice president in “Veep,” hosted fundraisers for him.

Fischer portrayed her rival as a politically naive disciple of Bernie Sanders, calling Osborn “a lifelong far-left Democrat now masquerading as a moderate ‘Independent.’”

Osborn countered with ads suggesting he was closer to Trump than liberals on a number of issues, although his calls for immigration reform were directed toward restricting U.S. corporations from recruiting and exploiting migrant labor at the expense of working-class Americans. “Companies are paying migrants low wages to enrich themselves,” he said.

Dan Osborn chats with patrons of a brewery in Beatrice, Neb.

In one ad, Osborn held a blowtorch and said: “I’m where President Trump is on corruption, China, the border. If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I’m pretty handy.” Republicans then attacked Osborn for leading the Kellogg strike, which they claimed led to the company’s announcement that the Omaha plant was set to close in 2026.

The strike was pivotal to Osborn’s political ascent, coming at a time when unions, including the United Auto Workers, were pushing harder against companies for higher wages and benefits. (Kellogg fired him after the strike, saying he was watching Netflix during work. He said the charge was trumped up and his dismissal was retaliation.) His pro-labor philosophy echoed Nebraska’s legacy of prairie populism, notably the founding of the People’s Party in the 1890s, which criticized Republicans and Democrats for failing to protect workers and farmers.

“It wasn’t until corporate greed came knocking at my doorstep that I really started to observe the world in a different way,” said Osborn, who studied up on labor history and worked with other union members to raise $200,000 in strike funds. “I enjoyed fighting for working-class people at a time when Kellogg’s had profited greatly after COVID while everyone was working seven days a week, 12 hours a day that whole year as essential workers, no time off.”

Widening class differences, he said, are reflected in Congress where many members, especially in the Senate, are rich. They wouldn’t relate, he said, to the fact that “debt collectors don’t care if you’re on strike.” Osborn, who mentioned during the campaign that he didn’t own a suit, alluded to the idea that Trump and the billionaires around him epitomize corporate America’s hold on politics.

“I don’t have a problem with the existence of billionaires,” he said. ”I have a problem with our elected officials being in that class. Somebody like me is going to approach a policy differently than Sen. Pete Ricketts, whose family founded TD Ameritrade and owns the Chicago Cubs. He’s not going to see the world like I do. The federal government should look more like its citizens.”

Osborn can sound like a factory man from a Bruce Springsteen song, a character whose youthful exuberance and restless sense of escape have been tempered by life’s hard awakenings. He made more than 200 campaign stops across the state last year. His stories of struggle resonated from farm fields to union halls: his dad riding the bus everyday to work, his mom hemming pants and cleaning houses to make extra money, and the way he felt before his Kellogg job when he temporarily relied on Medicaid after Megan became pregnant with Georgia.

“I didn’t like that,” said Osborn, who mowed yards and landscaped to support his wife and newborn. In a post on X during last year’s campaign, he wrote that he had to “kill my dream of hanging a diploma on the wall because my family needed health insurance, diapers, and food on the table.”

“I’m glad that program (Medicaid) was there,” he said in an interview, “or I would have started out life with huge medical debt.”

One of his favorite stories recalls the time actor Charlton Heston, who played Moses in the “Ten Commandments” and later was president of the National Rifle Assn., got him fired as a bus boy.

“I was in high school working in a restaurant in the old-money part of town,” he said. “Heston comes in by himself and starts reading a book. I knew him. My dad made me watch all his movies.” Heston didn’t want to talk, said Osborn, who found that rude. “I grabbed his glass and said, ‘Hey, Chuck, do you want your water regular or parted, like Moses.’”

Osborn, in the telling, smiled.

“I was putting dishes away later and the manager taps me on the shoulder,” he said. “He told me, ‘I gotta fire you because Charlton Heston wants you fired.’ I had to leave then and there. I got a job at Godfather’s Pizza.”

It was pushing toward 7 p.m. The moon shone over Osborn’s house and the workers on his street were home for the night. A bottle of wine was uncorked.

“Dinner,” someone yelled.

He sat at the table with Megan, his daughters and the boyfriend. They talked about school, homelessness, a vacation to Rome, the war in Ukraine, and how Megan felt uncomfortable when political ads attacking her husband flashed across the TV in the sports bar and grill she manages. Her way of seeing the world frames Osborn’s politics, that people are exhausted, overworked and often not heard, but most of them are good and only want what’s fair.

“There are so many amazing and gracious people out there,” she said.

The plates were cleared. Eve went to do her homework. Georgia and the boyfriend drove away. Osborn went to the garage. The big door was open to the cold sky. It was getting late. There would be no work on the car. The tools were stacked and put away neat.

Politics

Trump Promotes ‘Freedom Fuel’ Gas Stations as Gas Prices Rise Again

Published

6 hours ago

July 10, 2026

Press Room

President Trump has promoted a chain of newly rebranded gas stations across the Philadelphia area with lower gas prices. The New York Times has not been able to get detailed information about who is behind the stations. The Trump administration says it did not fund or subsidize the company.

Politics

Kelley Paul: America’s Founders were the ‘first civil rights heroes’

Published

7 hours ago

July 10, 2026

Press Room

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

Kelley Paul is no stranger to the American political scene. As the wife of Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and the daughter-in-law of longtime former Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), she has seen her fair share of the campaign trail, emerging as a powerful surrogate during her husband’s 2016 presidential run.

She is also an accomplished writer, speaker, and public relations professional. As America ushers in its 250th anniversary, Paul saw the perfect opportunity to branch out into the world of children’s literature. Recently she sat down with Fox News Digital in Las Vegas at Freedom Fest to discuss her new book, “Good Night, Young American.”

Kelley Paul is the wife of Sen. Rand Paul and author of two books. (Courtesy Kelley Paul)

Paul credits her family for giving her the inspiration for the new project:

“I have to give a lot of credit to my daughter-in-law, Kate. She and our son were over for dinner last summer with our grandson, who was only six months old at the time. And Kate was like, you know, we need more patriotic books for babies. She wasn’t really happy with a lot of the book options she was seeing. And that night at dinner, we kind of played around with some ideas. And I came up with ‘Good Night Young American.’ And a year later, here it is.”

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“Good Night, Young American,” recommended for children ages 4–8, takes kids on a visually and thematically engaging journey through early and colonial history.

“Well, our revolutionary history is such a great adventure, right? So when I came up with the concept that my little boy would start out on the 4th of July with his parents, asking, what is it all about? I knew we’d be celebrating the 250th. Kids ask, what are we really celebrating?

And his dad describes the Declaration of Independence to him in the signing. So I tried to think what is going to appeal to children in this great adventure of our revolution. So when he falls asleep that night, he’s in the crow’s nest of the Mayflower. He is a pilgrim, he’s a colonist, and then he makes friends with all the great revolutionary heroes that we know. So he makes friends with Sam Adams, he joins the Sons of Liberty, he meets at the Green Dragon. This is so exciting for children, right?

It’s visual stuff. He makes friends with Ben Franklin, and he’s flying the kite. Dramatically rides on the midnight ride with Paul Revere. He and his dog, his little dog, are with him for all the adventures. And of course, he crosses the Delaware with George Washington. And I wanted to make the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the writing of it something that was dynamic and exciting visually. So I have him swinging on the Liberty Bell when the declaration is signed.”

Paul worked closely with the illustrator, Marika Monesi, to bring the events of America’s founding to life in an engaging and visually appealing way for children.

The Liberty Bell, originally saved from the British by Lynnport farmer Frederick Leaser, sits in its Philadelphia shrine. (iStock)

“She really captured the excitement on the little boy’s face, his personality, but I worked very close with her,” Paul said. “I wanted there to be a lot of movement, a lot of dynamic images. So, for example, with the Liberty Bell, for kids, a bunch of men standing around writing a document…I wanted to bring it to life. So I said, let’s have him running up to the top of the bell tower in Philadelphia at Freedom Hall and swinging on the Liberty Bell. And she was just such a great artist. With the George Washington scenes, he’s crossing the Delaware because that, again, is so visual. I wanted drive home to children the incredible bravery and courage of our founders, how cold and miserable and hard that war was.

“Also, I love the illustration that she did of the King of England reading the Declaration of Independence. I have to give my husband Rand a little credit there. On the first couple of drafts that she did, Rand was like, ‘He needs to be fatter. King George was famously fat!’ So it was a lot of fun. It was very collaborative.”

KELLEY PAUL ‘EXHAUSTED AND ANGRY’ THAT THOSE WHO HARASSED HER AND HER HUSBAND FACE NO CHARGES

Part of Paul’s motivation for the book was related to the teaching of American history today, and the controversies therein:

“I do think that we’ve gotten away from really celebrating our founders and our heroes. What they were doing in 1776 was incredibly radical, if you think about it. At that time, everyone accepted the divine right of kings. Everyone accepted hereditary rule. And our founders took Enlightenment ideas from John Locke and philosophers, and they turned it into the framework for a government. The idea of self-government and that our rights come from our Creator, that we have inalienable rights that are given to us by God and not from a king. Those were radical ideas of the time.

Historians say an early draft of the Declaration of Independence offered new insight into how Thomas Jefferson refined the nation’s founding document. (Stock Montage/Stock Montage/Getty Images)

I like to say our founders were the first civil rights heroes, the first civil libertarians. And I think our education system has gotten away from that. They don’t view them in the time that they existed, and suddenly now everything is oppressor versus oppressed narrative. And they are labeled more like colonizers or enslavers, and that’s the only view that they’re looked at, and not as human beings who sacrificed their very lives to write the Declaration of Independence, to form this country…it was an incredible, bold, and courageous act, but it was also an act of moral courage and philosophical courage.”

Ultimately, Paul hopes that her books will stimulate the natural curiosity of America’s youth to learn more about their rich history:

Participants carry the City of Cumberland’s “America 250” parade banner down Baltimore Street during the America 250 parade in downtown Cumberland, Maryland, on June 27, 2026. Spectators line both sides of the street as American and Maryland flags lead the procession. (Fox News Digital/ David Marcus)

“Well, I hope that my books, especially with America’s 250, will spark a lot of questions and that they will give a framework for parents to talk to their kids about the founding of this country. And I hope children from a very, very young age will come away with this idea that they are a part of America’s story, that they as Americans can take pride in the heroism of our revolutionary founders. That as Americans, this is all of our story. So that’s really my goal with the books.”

One of the biggest challenges Paul faced was taking big ideas that may be hard for a four or five-year-old to grasp, like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, and distilling them down into an accessible format for kids:

“Well, I try to use language that kids could understand, and very much use simple terms. But if you think about it, it is simple. Our rights come from God. And when he makes friends with Thomas Jefferson, he says, Thomas Jefferson has written this amazing document that says that we can all be free to live our lives the way we choose, and no government can take our rights to, you know, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness away from us.

He also talks about James Madison and the Bill of Rights and the most important right is freedom of speech. That is that no government can tell you what to say or what not to say.”

Rand Paul, who famously puts Constitutional principles front and center in the public square, also played a key role in the book’s thematic development.

Kelley Paul and her husband Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul. (Courtesy Kelley Paul)

“Rand has been incredibly supportive. I’m just so grateful and blessed to have had an amazing, now 36-year marriage to Rand Paul. And he was very involved. He would read over the drafts and gave me a lot of, like I said, good advice about things in history that he thought I should include.

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And I’m also just very grateful to be the daughter-in-law of Ron Paul. And so, I wanted these books to be there for our little grandson who I call ‘my favorite little American’ and help him from an early age be educated in the legacy that, the Paul family has in this country.”

David Unsworth reports on Latin America. You can follow David Unsworth on Twitter @LatinAmerUpdate

Politics

Trump ousts bipartisan commission in latest effort to reshape elections before midterm

Published

8 hours ago

July 10, 2026

Press Room

Trump ousts bipartisan commission in latest effort to reshape elections before midterm

WASHINGTON — President Trump dismissed all remaining members of the bipartisan U.S. Elections Assistance Commission this week, his latest move to assert control over national elections in the final months before midterm voting.

The White House defended the move as justified by a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision handing the president greater authority to reshape independent government agencies, including by replacing appointed leaders.

Democrats and some independent elections experts blasted it as politically motivated, counter to the interests of voters and foolhardy with the November election so close.

“Purging commissioners just months before the midterm elections and further gutting support for our state and local elections officials is a blatant part of his plan to politicize our elections and enable more unlawful and dangerous election interference,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, which oversees federal elections.

Padilla alleged the dismissals are an attempt by Trump “to dismantle yet another independent guardrail of our democracy designed to keep elections fair and secure.”

A White House official framed the dismissals in starkly different terms, saying the departing commissioners were “not totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.” It did not say when the president planned to appoint new commissioners.

The four-member commission was created by Congress in 2002 as part of the Help America Vote Act to help states improve their voting systems and voter access. By law, no more than two commissioners may belong to the same political party.

Historically, it has provided voluntary guidance and best practices for voting systems, and served as a sort of clearinghouse for election performance around the country — so that states and localities can learn from one another.

Since 2018, the panel has also disbursed more than $1 billion in election security grants, according to a report by the Bipartisan Policy Center. Those grants are then used to protect IT systems from foreign and domestic cyberattacks, update voting systems, ensure the accuracy of voter rolls and protect the integrity of ballots after they are cast.

Without leadership, the panel cannot take any official action until new members are nominated and confirmed by the Senate.

Benjamin W. Hovland, one of the Democratic commissioners removed by Trump, told NBC News that taking away a key federal agency designed to help state and local election administrators will have a negative effect on already strained elections officials.

“When you’re asking more and more of people without giving them the necessary resources, you know, mistakes happen,” he said.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, in a statement to The Times, said Trump was “injecting unnecessary chaos, confusion and instability into the very systems that Americans rely on to make their voices heard,” but that California “will not be intimidated or deterred” from maintaining elections “in which everyone can fairly and securely participate.”

California Atty. Gen Rob Bonta — whose office has already blocked federal agencies from implementing most of Trump’s election orders in court — called Trump’s firings “deeply troubling,” and said his office “will continue to closely monitor any efforts to weaken our democracy and fight back with every tool at our disposal.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said on X that “Newsom’s election protection efforts become more important by the day” — a reference to his recent push for state legislation that would make it a felony in California for anyone to seize ballots before a vote has been certified.

Newsom had said Thursday that Trump’s efforts to seize control over elections represented a “five-alarm fire” that must be confronted.

Trump’s dismantling of the commission comes as he wages a much broader campaign to rewrite voting rules. He has sought to place new restrictions on mail ballots, to tighten voter ID and proof of citizenship requirements for voters, to subject state voter rolls to federal oversight and purges, and to assert federal control over how and whether the U.S. Postal Service delivers mail ballots.

Much of that agenda, pushed through executive orders and other administrative actions, has been stymied by the courts, while stalling out in Congress, where it lacks support.

Whether Trump’s move to dismantle and reconstitute the commission will prove an effective path to instituting his election agenda remains unclear, experts said.

David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the election commission has always had a “very limited mandate,” can’t dictate policy to the states and has no law enforcement powers — meaning Trump’s dismissals will have little real effect on elections.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, wrote that Trump could try to illegally direct the commission to “do his bidding” by amending the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship — though that would also have limited effect and would be challenged in court.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Trump’s firing of the commissioners was part of a broader effort by the president to “sow distrust in our voting system so he can contest the results if they are not to his liking.”

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, said California has “the most robust standards” for elections in the country, which won’t change with the removal of the commissioners.

Still, she said word of the firings rocketed around a conference of county elections officials in San Diego on Thursday — with some wondering whether the dismissals would threaten federal election funding, and others lamenting the loss of the ousted commissioners’ deep experience.

Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, said in a statement to The Times that “any sudden change to the support structure for elections in the middle of an election cycle is concerning,” but that California “has a strong local and state foundation for election administration and voting systems support, and that will minimize any potential disruption caused by this action.”

In recent months, Trump has leveraged federal agencies to overhaul the nation’s voting rules in ways no previous president has attempted.

He has repeatedly pressured Republican lawmakers to pass a federal law that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship when they register, show identification when casting a ballot and force states to send voter data to the Department of Homeland Security.

Republican leaders have said the proposed SAVE America Act does not have enough votes to pass in the Senate. The GOP resistance has angered Trump, who on Friday said he was refusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill in protest.

The housing bill, which Trump called a “big yawn” last month, was to become law at midnight Friday without Trump’s signature.