OMAHA, NEBRASKA – The day I talked to Dan Osborn last month, he had just quit his job. He had been working as a steamfitter at Grunwald Mechanical, an HVAC contractor in Omaha, while also running his second campaign for U.S. Senate as an independent. The first one, two years ago against Republican Sen. Deb Fischer, nearly succeeded, with Osborn performing 14 points better against his Republican opponent than Kamala Harris did in Nebraska against hers. But a nonpolitician has to eat, so Osborn went back to work, even while signing up for a second campaign against Nebraska’s other senator, former Gov. Pete Ricketts.

The demands of the campaign trail got to be too much for a full-time job, and Osborn knows choosing it over a steady paycheck is a risky move. “There is a real possibility at the end of this that I lose my house,” he told me on the sidelines of a labor conference in Omaha. “This is why … less than 2 percent of people in the House and Senate come from the working class.”

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Democrats throughout the country are talking about the affordability crisis, but independent candidate Osborn is living it. He walks through the beef aisle and has to pass up expensive cuts of meat. He has to worry about affording medical treatment if he or his family has a health emergency. He knows that his kids are growing up in a country where the average age of a first-time homebuyer is 40.

I asked Osborn what he’s hearing from voters today that’s different from his first run. “The sense that I get is that they’ve lost complete faith in government as a whole,” he said. “Especially the young generation. They have a sense of nihilism right now that I don’t know that we’ve ever had in this country for that age group … They’re like, ‘Why should I care about anything?’”

Restoring that faith, to Osborn, requires creating a representative government that looks more like the country. After his 2024 campaign, he founded an organization called Working Class Heroes, to help get like-minded candidates elected who are not drawn from law firms and CEO suites. More of these candidates are now sprouting up across the country, many of them independents like Osborn: He mentioned House candidates like fisherman Bill Hill in Alaska, union fire captain Mike Thurow in rural and exurban eastern Wisconsin, and union firefighter Nate Powell in Spokane. Osborn said he’s talked to those candidates and given them advice on campaigning.

Democrats throughout the country are talking about the affordability crisis, but independent candidate Osborn is living it.

The movement has filtered down into local politics. Mike Gage, a former employee of Union Pacific railroad who heads the Nebraska AFL-CIO, told me that he recruited three union members to run for the state’s unicameral legislature in 2028. “Osborn has inspired them,” Gage said.

“In America, a mechanic can beat a billionaire,” Osborn said. “This is the foundation of our democracy, the American dream, and that can be attained by anyone. You don’t have to come from royalty, this isn’t a caste system, it’s not supposed to be. It’s still not there and I want to prove that.”

RICKETTS SETS UP AS PERHAPS a more appropriate foil for Osborn than Fischer did. He’s not a billionaire—just a mere $200 million in net worth—but his dad sure is. Joe Ricketts founded Ameritrade and merged it with TD Waterhouse in 2006; later, Charles Schwab bought it for $26 billion. The family owns the Chicago Cubs. That wealth has been thrown around to support Pete’s political career as governor and then senator, and punish his enemies. The family spent over $15 million in a decade-plus on Pete’s career, politicians, and ballot measures throughout the state. At one point, the Ricketts family put forth one out of every 14 dollars spent on Nebraska politics in a calendar year.

“He ran the state like a mob boss,” Osborn said. “If you didn’t have complete and utter loyalty, he would spend against you in the next primary … that left a wake of pissed-off conservatives in this state.”

So far, however, that money bomb has not enabled Ricketts to pull away. Osborn actually raised more money than Ricketts in the first quarter of the year, and a February poll showed the two in a virtual tie. Perhaps that’s why all the Ricketts dirty tricks have come out, and why the May 12 Senate primary, which Osborn will not be involved in, has become increasingly critical.

Two years ago, Democrats didn’t field a candidate in the Senate race, allowing Osborn to go up against Fischer one-on-one. This year’s Democratic primary, at first glance, is a sleepy affair: The two candidates running have raised a grand total of $4,163. But under the surface, the primary has yielded fierce charges and countercharges about plants and attempts to undermine Osborn’s ability to win.

William Forbes, one of the candidates, is a three-time Trump voter and anti-abortion activist who attended a GOP candidate training seminar prior to running as a Democrat. The state party and Osborn have charged that Forbes was put up as a dummy candidate by Ricketts so there would be a Democrat on the general-election ballot to draw votes from Osborn. Ricketts has denied having any association with Forbes; his campaign office did not respond to a request for comment.

In response, a Democrat named Cindy Burbank, a self-employed pharmacy technician, entered the race, explicitly to defeat Forbes, the “Pete Ricketts stooge.” Burbank has said that she would get out of Osborn’s way after defeating Forbes, giving Osborn a “fair shot” against Ricketts. Osborn says he’s never met her.

Republicans tried to end that fair shot. Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen pulled Burbank off the ballot, claiming that she didn’t want to serve in the office that she was running for, and therefore wasn’t a “good-faith candidate.” (As if Forbes were.) After some legal wrangling, the Nebraska Supreme Court ordered Burbank back on the ballot, saying that Evnen had made his objection too late.

The state Democratic Party did not actively recruit either candidate in the primary. They have been mobilizing for Burbank with slate mailers and door-knocking to ensure that Forbes doesn’t become the nominee. “We’ve never done so much mail this early in a primary,” said Precious McKesson, executive director of the party. Word has spread about Forbes across the state. “I go on Facebook, everyone and their mother knows who he is,” Gage said.

The party chair, Jane Kleeb, endorsed Osborn last year. “I like Dan Osborn, I think he’s a great candidate,” said McKesson. “We want to make sure that working people have a seat at the table and working-class people have someone who’s their advocate.”

The Republican tricks didn’t stop there. A few weeks ago, a man named Jeffery Davis filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, claiming that Osborn was using an account from his Working Class Heroes political action committee to supplement payments to campaign staff, including his wife. There were no internal records attached to the complaint.

Davis is chair of a state campaign finance watchdog, the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission, which he was appointed to by Pete Ricketts when Ricketts served as governor. Davis said he was filing the complaint in his personal capacity, but the press release announcing the complaint used his official title.

“We haven’t violated any laws,” Osborn told me. His wife was getting paid from Working Class Heroes as a state recruiter, but she is paid separately through a different account for work on the campaign as an operations manager. “She wears a lot of hats … it’s a big old fat nothingburger [but] it’s designed to take oxygen from us.” On local radio, Osborn was more succinct about Ricketts’s multilayered tactics: “pathetic and desperate.”

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OSBORN IS RUNNING ON LARGELY the same proposals and perspectives as he did in his first run—support for labor, kitchen-table economics, and fighting political corruption—but the last time, Trump was on the ballot, which dominated the conversation. “Deb Fischer spent $14 million just calling me a Democrat, Ricketts will probably spend $50 million,” he said. “What we’re hearing now is being able to focus more on policy.”

That includes how tariff policy is hurting agriculture throughout the state, how Congress has abdicated its authority on checking the executive branch, and how immigration enforcement has veered out of people’s comfort zones (“The Trump administration said we’re going to focus on criminals, there was never anything said about 1,000 masked agents in the streets of Minneapolis,” Osborn explained). He said Nebraskans were very uneasy about the war in Iran and that Congress needed to step up to tackle it. The War Powers Act’s limit on unauthorized military action of 60 days is too long, he added: “You shouldn’t need longer than two weeks, with all the bases we have around the world.”

The Nebraskans he’s talking with, Osborn said, are also starting to pick up on the role of corporate power in denying the necessary solutions to America’s challenges. “I point to any industry a person is working in and it’s consolidated,” he said. “A lot of people are talking about the way to fix a lot of things is … antitrust and anti-monopoly laws.”

There’s a heartland tradition of fighting corporate power that dates back to the prairie populists. A new book by Cory Haala, When Democrats Won the Heartland, describes how anti-corporate Democrats made real gains from Wisconsin to South Dakota, speaking to “voters who felt ignored by elites, feeling they had lost control over their own lives.”

Osborn sees part of his role as educational, explaining to people how that process of losing control works, through subjects like the role of private equity in the destruction of small towns, or how John Deere keeps farmers from fixing their own equipment, or what a noncompete agreement actually means for workers. But one of his most teachable moments has been about how corruption means that working-class concerns never get a hearing in Washington. “This is why people have lost faith in government,” he said.

His Nebraska Fairness Plan opens with a full anti-corruption agenda to end dark money and unlimited corporate spending in politics, a ban on congressional stock trading, closing the revolving door so members of Congress cannot work as lobbyists after their political careers end, and even reasonable age limits (along with term limits) on elected officials and the Supreme Court. Memorably, Osborn ran an ad last cycle with corporate logos festooned upon Fischer’s suit jacket, like a NASCAR driver’s. He plans to update it for Ricketts.

“If you got hundreds of millions of dollars in your bank account and your dad has $8 billion that you’re the heir to, why do you even want to do this job?” Osborn said. “Why do you even want to walk around and cosplay as a senator and take people’s health care away? Like, it’s frickin’ weird!”

When Osborn addressed a labor conference in Omaha, he replayed his usual stump speech, stressing his independent bona fides and how joining a union is “as American as apple pie and baseball.” Nebraska, where legislators run without party labels, where people mostly see themselves as working-class, could be one place where his message really works.

“People try to put me in a box,” he told the crowd of about 70 union members. “The only box I belong in is with the people in this room.”

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David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90.