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.

“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 the 1988 Pontiac Firebird that he and his son, Liam, have worked on together over the past year.

(Rebecca S. Gratz / For The Times)

“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 know what a paycheck is,” Dan Osborn says. “I live week to week on it. And it’s not stretching as far.”

(Rebecca S. Gratz / For The Times)

Advertisement

“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 July.

(Margery Beck / Associated Press)

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.’”

Dan Osborn, second from right, helps serve lasagna as his family, including, from left, his daughters Georgia and Eve, Brad Walton, and his wife, Megan, sit down for dinner.

(Rebecca S. Gratz / For The Times)

Advertisement

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.