Populist Candidates in Deep-Red States

A labor-forward, no-nonsense style of Democratic campaigning is emerging in the Plains and Midwest. It’s unclear if it’ll actually work.

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“Oftentimes, when I can have a conversation with an independent or a Republican, they’ll look at me and they’ll go, ‘You don’t sound like a Democrat.’ And that’s because [I] don’t,” said Katrina Christiansen, an agricultural engineer running for a U.S. Senate seat in North Dakota.

Christiansen is just one of several Democratic (or independent) Senate candidates who are distancing themselves from the image and “sound” of what voters expect from a typical Democrat. This cycle, three candidates in particular have tried to differentiate themselves and chart a new style of Democratic politics that’s more palatable in America’s Plains and Midwestern states: Christiansen in North Dakota, Lucas Kunce in Missouri, and Dan Osborn in Nebraska.

For all three, the name of the game is economic populism. The candidates have been avoiding “culture war” issues like LGBTQ+ rights or abortion in favor of conversations on labor, inflation, and antitrust policy.

This move toward economic populism didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. The party has been shifting toward a more populist image and rhetoric for years now, as evidenced by the success of candidates like John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Raphael Warnock in Georgia.

Going from purple states to Republican strongholds is not going to be easy, and perhaps could even be futile. But as these candidates show, you have to start somewhere.

More from Emma Janssen

The push to bring more rural, typically red districts and states into the party fold comes after decades of Democratic losses in the Midwest and Rust Belt areas. Mike Lux, a longtime Democratic operative and the founder of American Family Voices, a campaign strategy and research organization, told me that he hopes to see more candidates who are innovating new campaign strategies and ways to reach rural voters.

Lux hammered home the party’s losses: “Fifteen or so years ago, North Dakota had two Democratic senators. South Dakota had two Democratic senators. Montana, for a while, had two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor. Nebraska had a Democratic senator, and before that, a Democratic governor. Iowa was much more of a swing state and had a Democratic senator. Missouri was much more of a swing state, and had a Democratic governor.”

But clearly, things have changed.

“It’s become very hard for Democrats to break through in those states,” said Lux. “And so I think part of what Democrats, or in Osborn’s case, independents, in those states have to do is they have to figure out how to separate themselves from the national Democratic brand.” In his estimation, the best option for getting that done is to use the theme of “economic populism.”

Declaring Independence

While Christiansen and Kunce have separated themselves from the national Democratic brand by emphasizing their working-class upbringings, their respective connections to agriculture and the military, and pro-labor policies, Osborn has rejected the Democratic Party altogether.

From the beginning, Osborn has been running as an independent. One day after the primary process ended in Nebraska, Osborn announced that he wouldn’t accept the endorsement or support of any political party, though the state Democratic Party had been poised to lend their endorsement. It was a move that left the state Democratic chair Jane Kleeb feeling “betrayed” and threatening to find a Democratic write-in candidate (ultimately, that effort fizzled), but that may pay off for Osborn.

“Just by saying he’s an independent,” Lux said, “that gave him sort of an early [boost] because people don’t like either party.”

In Lux’s view, observers misinterpret the shift to Republicans in the Plains states. “It’s not that they’re in love with the Republicans. They think the Republicans are too close to big business, are too close to CEOs,” he said. But, at the same time, “they perceive the Democrats as being completely off the map because of the combination of selling them out on economics—again, this is their perception—and not relating to their lifestyles.”

“They think of Democrats as big-city types and not small-town types,” he added.

Perhaps for that reason, victory remains a long shot. The only poll in North Dakota, from last year, had Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) up sizably on Christiansen, and a recent Missouri poll had Kunce down double digits. But of the three candidates, Osborn seems most likely to compete.

A late-August Split Ticket and SurveyUSA joint poll showed incumbent Republican Sen. Deb Fischer with 39 percent of the vote and Osborn with 38 percent, with 23 percent of respondents undecided. Meanwhile, for the presidential election in Nebraska, Trump is polling at 54 percent to Harris’s 37 percent. I spoke to an Osborn campaign staffer who said that the campaign was excited by Osborn’s polling, though they acknowledged that it will still be an uphill battle to get him elected.

Economic Populism

All three candidates have leaned heavily into economic populism, which emerges naturally from their biographies. Christiansen grew up working-class in rural Nebraska and now works in the agricultural industry as an engineer. Kunce too, grew up in a working-class family before going on to serve in the Marine Corps. Osborn, a longtime industrial mechanic at an Omaha Kellogg plant, earned his credentials by leading a successful 2021 strike.

The three candidates have also seized upon their opponents’ ties to corporate money and power, as well as their Washington insider statuses, to try to siphon off votes.

When I asked the Osborn campaign strategist what Osborn’s defining difference is from incumbent Deb Fischer, they immediately highlighted his rejection of corporate money and noted that the average donation to his campaign is just $35. Meanwhile, the top donor to Fischer is rail company Union Pacific (the world’s biggest rail yard is in Nebraska and owned by Union Pacific).

Recent polling shows that voters want to see action on corporate power and monopolies, but don’t get the sense that the Biden administration has taken action. Candidates running economic populist campaigns can seize on this dissatisfaction, coupled with their opponents’ ties to corporate money.

Christiansen, for her part, says that the three biggest policy messages she wants to get across to voters are on inflation, health care, and immigration. Specifically, she’s been focusing on incumbent Sen. Cramer’s time in the House from 2013 to 2019, after which he won his Senate seat.

“When he was in Congress, and he was in the House, he voted to repeal the ACA every time it came up. He voted against capping prescription drug prices for seniors. He voted against Medicare drug price negotiations. He’s not a friend of the regular people,” she told me.

“One of the things that I say on the campaign trail is he is a career politician. He’s been in politics for over 30 years. He’s really great at identifying problems and assigning blame, and that’s really where his job stops and he doesn’t know how to fix things, like inflation.”

Economic populist messaging and policy is particularly relevant in North Dakota, Christiansen explained, because the state has a long history of using the government to protect workers’ rights and stimulate economic growth. North Dakota has had both a state-owned bank and a state-owned flour mill for over a century now, and has a requirement that all pharmacies are majority-owned by state residents.

Personal Style

Policy positions, of course, are not the only factors in campaigning, especially not in populist campaigns like these. Style, whether it be physical appearance or energy and tone of voice, has emerged as a technique that these candidates use to differentiate themselves from both their incumbent opponents and the national Democratic brand.

“What we’re seeing with Osborn so far, at least from a visual standpoint … [is] that sort of economic populism that’s coming through. You know, you don’t see him in a tie. You don’t see him in a quarter zip. I think I’ve seen him in a flannel shirt, a barn coat, and that kind of thing,” said Randall Adkins, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Indeed, as the Prospect reported, when Osborn visited Washington for meetings this spring, he didn’t own a suit.

Meanwhile, Kunce and his Republican opponent, Sen. Josh Hawley, sparred publicly at the Missouri State Fair in August, spending 20 minutes lobbing insults back and forth, arguing over campaign ads and debate plans. Though it was Hawley who went looking for Kunce, the two candidates matched each other’s energy, neither backing down or politely stepping away from the skirmish.

“Josh, why are you so weird?” Kunce taunted Hawley at one point. “Man, why are you so creepy?”

At another point, Kunce goaded Hawley about a potential debate time: “I’ll see you on Fox News, bro, we offered you a safe space,” Kunce said. The style of public argument is a far cry from the “they go low, we go high” mentality that had characterized the Democratic Party for years.

Though most of the conversation consisted of insults and posturing, there was some substantive debate about the candidates’ positions on labor, with Kunce calling Hawley’s embrace of unions an electoral ploy. Since 2016, Hawley has made a complete 180 turn from his anti-union positions, including his support for preserving a union-busting right-to-work law in the state, which voters dismantled in 2018.

To Christiansen, the only way to win in a deep-red state like North Dakota is to avoid coming across as a capital-D Democrat.

“The nationalization of our politics has colored what a Democrat is. It’s a social liberal elite sort of person, and so we just have to tear down that barrier with our campaign,” she said. Part of that means staying on message to shift conversations away from culture-war issues and back toward economic policy, and part of it requires dispelling misconceptions about what Democrats actually believe in. “Nobody’s coming for your guns,” Christiansen emphasized. “I’m a gun owner, right?”

Democratic Disinvestment

All three candidates, despite their party affiliations, are running in the context of long-term Democratic Party disinvestment in red states and districts, where Republicans have gotten comfortable, confident, and complacent due to a lack of serious challengers from the left.

Distance from the party, whether it be through narrative shifts in the case of Christiansen or Kunce, or through outright rejection in Osborn’s case, may yield electoral benefits in red states. But it also leaves candidates with a lack of campaign staffers, financing, and strategic advising.

The Osborn campaign staffer said that Osborn has been able to run a campaign unburdened by national party policy platforms or norms, which has in some ways been freeing. In other ways, though, it brings a concrete lack of reliable funding and expertise.

Christiansen spoke to the lack of support from the national party when she first ran for Senate in 2022. “I didn’t have a campaign manager. There was no infrastructure for building up fundraising. There was no infrastructure for developing communications. I’m an engineer. I’m not a politician. How do you stay on message?”

She credits her campaign manager Kerry Billings for helping her navigate these hurdles. “If the Democratic Party is interested in expanding the map so that everything’s not always such a slog, and they can’t focus on anything else, they need to bring in people like Kerry to these rural states,” Christiansen said. “Because he knows how to do things. It’s about having the infrastructure.”

The struggle to eke out victory in difficult Senate races tends to lead to Democrats ignoring red states. And there are maybe good reasons to do so. But it limits options for Democrats to hold the Senate; right now, 11 out of 12 Senate seats in the six most highly contested battleground states are in Democratic hands, yet Democrats are barely holding onto a majority in the chamber.

“I think you have to widen the playing field, not shrink it,” Lux told me. “If there’s no money to answer the onslaught of Republican messaging, of course, these candidates will lose. But if, at the end of the race, these candidates have enough in the bank to answer that, then I think they have a chance.”

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