In the back room of a brewery in southeastern Nebraska, more than three dozen people crowded together this summer to hear from Dan Osborn, a former cereal plant worker and independent running for U.S. Senate. The standing-room-only crowd in the small town of Beatrice was larger than Osborn expected, but it stood out for more than its size. Those attending ranged from supporters of former President Donald Trump wearing “Make America Great Again” hats to voters firmly backing Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats. Osborn’s message to all of them was that America’s two-party system has let them down. “There’s nobody like me in the United States Senate,” he told the crowd. “Right now, the Senate is a country club of millionaires that work for billionaires.” Osborn has cobbled together a campaign in deeply conservative Nebraska that rejects both major political parties as part of a broken system. For a guy who held his first campaign news conferences out of the garage of his suburban Omaha home, he has surprised pundits by emerging as a serious challenger to two-term Republican Sen. Deb Fischer in what had been considered a safe seat for the GOP only months ago. The contest has attracted $21 million in spending from outside groups, favoring Osborn, and even Fischer’s campaign acknowledges that the race is closer than expected. There is no Democratic candidate running, but a win for Osborn could disrupt Republican plans to reclaim a majority in the Senate. Osborn has said he won’t caucus with either party. That hasn’t stopped Democrats from openly supporting him. During the first 16 days of October, after the national spotlight on him had intensified, Osborn raised more than $3 million, almost all of it from individuals and the bulk of it through Democrats’ Act Blue fundraising site, Federal Election Commission reports show. That was almost six times the $530,000 that Fischer raised. Osborn has raised nearly $8 million total to Fischer’s $6.5 million, and with a little less than three weeks before the election, he had $1.1 million cash, twice what Fischer had. Osborn has succeeded not only by rejecting political parties but through boots-on-the-ground campaigning across the state, backed by clever ads — in one he notes “I don’t even own a suit” — that contrast his working-class roots with a system where he says politicians “are bought and sold.” Osborn is a U.S. Navy and Nebraska Army National Guard veteran and industrial mechanic who gained national recognition three years ago when he successfully led a labor strike at Kellogg’s cereal plants, winning higher wages and other benefits. That background shapes his view that working families are being steamrolled by a growing wealth gap, he says. A win by Osborn would be a giant upset in a state where Republicans hold all statewide offices and all congressional districts. Fischer is a rancher from Valentine, a town of 2,600 people in northern Nebraska about 300 miles (483 kilometers) northwest of Omaha. She was a little-known state legislator when she ran as an outsider in 2012, winning a competitive primary and then defeating Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic governor and U.S. senator. Her campaign ads that year showed her leaning up against fence posts and called her “sharp as barb wire, tougher than a cedar fence post.” “Nebraskans […]  | Read More The Yeshiva World