The Democratic Revival Starts With a Non-Democrat

The return of Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn is the best news Democrats have received in a while. The irony, of course, is that Osborn is not running as a Democrat at all. He’s launching a second independent bid, this time against Republican Pete Ricketts.

Osborn gets relatively little national attention — a recent New York Times column was the exception, not the rule — and he never parlayed losing a Senate race, like Beto O’Rourke, into a glossy magazine cover. He is not, in any sense, famous. A former labor-union leader who led a successful strike against a Kellogg plant in Omaha, Osborn ran for the Senate last year against Deb Fischer, the Republican incumbent. Fischer was the heavy favorite; Donald Trump won Nebraska overwhelmingly in 2020 and would go on to beat Kamala Harris there by 20 points. Osborn, though, ran well ahead of Harris, and lost to Fischer by only six points.

The Democratic Party, nationwide, is far from doomed, despite Trump’s return to the White House and the GOP’s passage of his Medicaid-slashing reconciliation bill. Trump is steadily losing popularity, and Democrats, with only a narrow deficit in the House, are widely forecasted to flip the chamber next year. They have plenty to campaign on now: the alienating DOGE cuts, the attacks on Medicaid and food stamps, and the economic instability of the tariff regime. If J.D. Vance is the Republican nominee in 2028, he’ll have to run on the last four years of Trump chaos. The Democrats running for president can lash him or whoever else emerges at the top of the Republican mountain.

But the Senate is another matter. Next year’s map is foreboding, and it doesn’t necessarily get much better in subsequent years. The problem is a familiar one: Democrats have not fixed their rural-state problem and continue to bleed out too many working-class votes. Once, there were Democratic candidates who regularly won Senate elections in Ohio, Iowa, Montana, the Dakotas, and Nebraska. In most of these states, the Democratic brand is in the gutter. The Republicans don’t necessarily deliver for them, but the Democrats are viewed as far too alienating on cultural issues.

Osborn’s independent run is able to circumvent at least some of these challenges. He is free of the Democratic label and free to break with the party when he sees fit. His campaign last year was a blend of economic populism (support for labor rights and a higher minimum wage) and cultural conservatism (backing gun rights and a tighter border) that is rarely found among top-flight candidates in either party. It might be the secret sauce to winning a lot more elections in America, where neither party is willing to defy certain policy orthodoxies to sufficiently grow their numbers. For a brief period, after the 2024 election, the MAGA wing of the Republican Party threatened to realign the electorate, forcing the GOP left on economic matters while keeping its culturally right-wing base. Instead, through Elon Musk’s shredding of the federal bureaucracy and the Big Beautiful Act’s assault on the social safety net, it became clear that fiscal conservatives were still in charge.

For Democrats to climb back into the Senate majority and stay there, they will need not only Osborn to win but multiple Osborns who are willing, at the minimum, to not keep Republicans in power. If Osborn had beaten Fischer, it’s plausible Trump’s reconciliation package never would have passed the Senate. And if independents sat in other states hostile to Democrats, Republicans would have a far harder time imposing their will on the country.

Osborn’s odds of victory are still long. Ricketts is from a billionaire family and will probably take his race more seriously than Fischer did hers. National Republicans will be ready, too, to defend Ricketts and blast away at Osborn from the outset. What may work in his favor, however, is the national environment. 2026 appears set up to be a classic midterm backlash election, with Republicans on the defensive. More importantly, perhaps, midterms have become increasingly friendly for Democrats who have a motivated, college-educated base willing to show up for non-presidential cycles. The election in Nebraska will feature far fewer Trump-supporting voters, since the president won’t be topping the ballot. If Osborn runs aggressively enough, the race can get even closer than last year’s. Osborn’s path, realistically, is the one that has to be followed. Conventional Democrats are getting crushed in Nebraska, and states like it, otherwise. Perhaps, in due time, the Democratic image will be repaired enough to make a go of it in such forbidding territory and reach the heights they enjoyed in the first years of the Obama era. Until then, they’ll have to hope Osborn heralds a new age and is not another political curiosity who is forgotten in defeat.