Years ago, before most Nebraskans had ever heard of Dan Osborn, he won his first election in the state: vice president of the local union representing workers at the Kellogg's cereal plant in Omaha, where he had worked as an industrial mechanic since 2004.
About three months into his tenure as the labor group's VP, the president stepped down, Osborn recalled, and the U.S. Navy veteran stepped up.
Two years later — after the pandemic brought grueling hours for a strained workforce and  — Osborn did "one of the hardest things I've had to do," he recalled at a campaign event this month amid his nonpartisan bid to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer.
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Facing contract negotiators who sought to undercut workers' salary growth and discontinue the company's pension program, Osborn led the members of the Omaha local on a strike, taking "500Â of my friends and their families out into the great unknown, not knowing if we were gonna have jobs at the end of it," he said.
"But we all felt like we were on the right side of it."
The strike  that the union said made gains and no concessions. Kellogg's said the deal provided "immediate, across-the-board wage increases and enhanced benefits for all."
It also catapulted Osborn, 49, into the public eye and the political sphere.
Nearly three years after the strike ended — after in a move that he has cast as retaliation, after the cereal maker announced in 2026 — Osborn is trying to become the first non-Republican elected to the Senate in Nebraska since 2006 by leaning into his working class background and the lessons he learned on the picket line in Omaha.
"I want to continue to be a voice for the working-class people that don't have a voice," Osborn told a crowd of more than 60 supporters at a campaign event this month in Lincoln, where he called the Congress he is hoping to infiltrate a "country club of millionaires that work for billionaires."
"I never thought that I would run for office — especially this high of an office," he said. "But the strike showed me that if we band together as people around issues and causes and things like that, we can make a difference in everybody's lives."
It's a message that appears to be surprisingly resonant across Nebraska, where former President Donald Trump in 2020 and where Osborn's opponent, Fischer, won more votes than any other candidate in May's statewide primary. (Osborn, who had to petition to appear on the November ballot as a nonpartisan candidate, was not on the primary ballot).
More recently, polls have shown Osborn closely trailing — if not leading — Fischer, the GOP incumbent seeking her third term in the Senate. A poll funded by Osborn's campaign late last month , though Fischer's campaign released a poll last week that by 6%.
An upset win for Osborn could prevent Republicans from capturing a majority in the Senate, where the GOP, now at a two-seat disadvantage in the body, is expected to flip Democratic seats in West Virginia and Montana. There are competitive Senate races in a handful of other states, including Wisconsin and Ohio, but in the country.
Osborn's chances could conceivably be boosted by the either-or vote Nebraskans will face over whether to enshrine the state's 12-week abortion ban into the state's constitution or effectively repeal the ban through an amendment that would guarantee the right to the procedure until "fetal viability."
Voters in other traditionally conservative states like Kentucky and Montana have either affirmed abortion access or rebuffed attempts to undermine it since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
"I would codify Roe on a federal level," said Osborn, who also supports continued access to contraceptives and in vitro fertilization. "And this is why: because that's probably the hardest decision a woman and their family and spouse ... it's the hardest decision they'll ever have to make."
The race's close nature — and some of Osborn's more progressive views — boosting and attacking each candidate, including $5.8 million in support of Osborn and $2 million opposing Fischer.
Groups backing Fischer, in turn, have spent more than $3 million opposing Osborn, including on a deluge of commercials that feature Osborn's face alongside cutout photos of national Democrats,
The attack ads, Osborn said, are the aspect of his Senate race that have kept him up at night as the campaign enters its final weeks.
"It's thinking of my 16-year-old daughter, whose friends showed her an ad at school and say, 'Oh ... your dad's a baby killer.' That's uncalled for," Osborn said, later adding: "I really, really, really didn't want it to get like this."
He took aim at Fischer's campaign for "go(ing) negative immediately out of the gate, once she could not ignore me any longer." Ads began blanketing Nebraska's airwaves not long after in late August.
"If I'm a U.S. senator for the last almost 12 years, aren't you touting your accomplishments at this point?" Osborn said. "Aren't you saying, 'Look, this is why you need to keep me in. This is what I'm working on. ... To go negative right out of the gate makes no sense to me."
In a statement, a spokesman for Fischer's campaign said that "life, and how we protect it, is a very serious concern for many Nebraskans. They deserve to know where their candidates stand on the issue. Sen. Fischer is pro-life, and Mr. Osborn is not.â€
Fischer, who in September nationwide, has also critiqued Osborn over a lack of "depth" when he talks about policy with voters.
Osborn has a few platform issues he sermonizes on in his discussions with voters. Among them are Washington reforms — including congressional term limits, new campaign finance laws and a ban on stock trading among members of Congress.
His top priority, he said, is establishing the "right to repair," which would undercut lifetime contracts with manufacturers that lock owners of equipment, cars and technology into exclusive maintenance service agreements.
"It's taking money out of our pockets and we don't even know it," Osborn said. "It's giving these corporations — they're abusing us. And that's how we stop them."
On other fronts, though, Osborn's policy stances can lack conviction as he tries to stake out the middle ground.
´¡³¾¾±»åÌý, he called his policy positions "plastic" and "malleable," as he described himself as unbeholden to party bosses. Asked by an attendee at an October campaign event if would be willing to restrict arms sales in the Middle East to exclude offensive weapons, Osborn started his response with: "I would entertain the idea."
In response to another question at the event over how Osborn would use his outsized power as a free agent in a closely split Senate, he harkened back to his earliest days at the cereal plant in 2004.
"It's gonna be just like probably when I started as a mechanic at Kellogg's: I didn't know what I was doing," he said, later adding: "But it's going to be learning how to operate, and it's going to be forming alliances, talking to people and figuring who you can best align with to affect change."
More than anything, that is Osborn's pitch to voters: his election would mark change, ousting a two-term incumbent and sending a working-class political newcomer to a Washington flush with "career politicians," he said.
His message is not entirely different from the one Fischer offered when she first rose to the Senate in 2012, while running on her record as a state lawmaker from Valentine who said Nebraska "can't keep sending the same kind of persons to Washington or things won't change."
A new kind of candidate offering an age-old populist message, Osborn insists that he would be in Washington who he is in Nebraska, who he was on the picket line in Omaha, when, he said, he had job offer to run the maintenance crew at a brewery for $140,000 a year.
"I didn't take it," Osborn said. "I could have easily just left and been like, 'You're all on your own. Good luck.' And it would have been beneficial for my family to do that. But I didn't do it because I wasn't going to leave my people in their time of need."
Republican U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer is running for reelection against independent Dan Osborn.Â
Here is the Lincoln Journal Star's comprehensive guide to the 2024 Nebraska general election.Â