I would have loved to vote for a real Democrat this year. I want to say that first, before anything else, because everything that follows is going to sound like a case for a man I'm not entirely comfortable making a case for, and I don't want you to mistake enthusiasm for what this actually is.(damn long sentence)
But here's the thing.
I wrote some of this before the recordings came out.
The recordings changed the equation for me.
Not because I suddenly decided Dan Osborn is a saint. He isn't. Not because I think the things he said should be ignored. They shouldn't. And not because I think every criticism of him is a Republican talking point.
I listened to the tapes.
I heard the contempt in them. I heard the anger. I heard a man saying things in private that he would never put in a campaign speech. I heard the kind of language that can make a voter wonder who, exactly, they're putting in that Senate chair.
And then I thought about it.
Really thought about it.
And I came out of the recordings more convinced I should vote for him, not less.
That's probably going to require some explaining.
So let me explain.
I have voted for real Democrats in this state before, on real platforms, making the real argument for what this party is supposed to stand for, and I have lost every flipping time, by margins that stopped feeling like elections years ago and started feeling like weather reports you already knew the forecast for. This year my own party looked at its bench, did the math, and said fuck it and decided not to run anyone at all. The Nebraska Democratic Party's actual primary winner, a retired pharmacy technician named Cindy Burbank who beat a spoiler-adjacent pastor with 89.2 percent of the vote, dropped out in July and endorsed the independent instead. The state party chair put the entire strategy in five words on social media: "We like the odds of a mechanic vs a billionaire." That's not a metaphor. That's the literal plan. Recruit a real candidate, win the primary, and then step aside for someone who isn't in the party at all.
I understand why. I still felt something close it when I read it. You don't get to skip the part where you notice what you're giving up just because the arithmetic tells you to.
I want to sit in that discomfort a minute longer before I start building the case for him, because I think skipping past it too fast is its own kind of dishonesty.
What actually bothered me wasn't sentiment. It was strategy, and I think the strategy itself deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. A political party isn't supposed to be nothing more than a collection of people trying to figure out how to win the next election. It's supposed to be an argument about what kind of country you want to build and what kind of people you want to build it with. When you stop making that argument, eventually people stop knowing what you're for. Every time a state party clears the field for a charismatic independent instead of building a real bench, it's a year the party didn't spend recruiting county commissioners, didn't spend building a farm system, didn't spend making the actual argument to voters that might still win here in a decade if anyone bothered to make it for more than one election cycle. Osborn doesn't build that infrastructure. He can't. He's not in the party. When he's gone, whether he wins or loses, the Nebraska Democratic Party is exactly as thin as it was before him, plus one more cycle where nobody did the unglamorous work of actually growing it. That's not a feeling. That's a real, structural cost, and I don't think it gets paid for by one good Tuesday in November if he wins.
I've spent enough years watching western Nebraska towns empty out to know what happens when you stop maintaining something because maintaining it isn't immediately profitable. First the store closes. Then the next one. Then the bank moves. Then the kids leave. Then somebody drives through town one afternoon and asks what happened here, and the honest answer is that nothing happened all at once. The infrastructure just wasn't maintained. Political parties can die that way too. Not with a funeral. With neglect.
And I'll admit the "I won't caucus with either party" pitch itself never fully sat right with me either, before I did the reading that follows. It has the shape of integrity. It can also be the shape of a dodge, a way to take credit for every vote a constituent likes and duck responsibility for every one they don't, since there's no platform to hold him to and no caucus to make him answer for a broken promise. I didn't resolve that doubt by deciding it was wrong. I resolved it by deciding it was a real risk I was choosing to take anyway, with my eyes open, rather than a concern I'd talked myself out of.
The moment I actually decided, if I'm honest, wasn't reading a polling number. It was sitting at my kitchen table one night this spring with two browser tabs open, one on a watchdog complaint I'll explain in full further down, the other on Nebraska campaign finance records showing that Pete Ricketts and his family spent at least $9.8 million of their own money on Nebraska political campaigns and causes over the decade he ran for and served as governor, on top of a family fortune built on TD Ameritrade that Forbes has placed north of $3.7 billion. Osborn's FEC complaint alleges $278,000 moved to his wife's consulting companies. That's a real number and a real problem, and I'm going to give you the full details in a minute rather than soften them. But $278,000 against a family that's put nearly $10 million of its own money into buying influence in this state, on top of a multi-billion-dollar fortune, isn't two versions of the same story. It's a difference of scale so large it changes what kind of problem each one actually is. Osborn's is a campaign that cut a corner and got caught. Ricketts' is simply what unlimited family money does to a state's politics when nobody ever has to file a complaint about it because none of it is against any law.
His name is Dan Osborn, and in November I am going to stand in a booth in Scotts Bluff County and mark a ballot for him anyway. I want to walk you through the whole thing, the parts that should worry you and the parts that complicate the worry, because I think a version of this exact reckoning is coming for more progressive voters than just the ones standing where I'm standing.
The man himself, and where he actually stands
Dan Osborn was born in 1975. He served in the Navy, then the Nebraska Army National Guard, then went to work as an industrial mechanic at the Kellogg's plant in Omaha. He became president of his union local, and in the fall of 2021 he led that local out on a seventy-seven day strike, during a stretch when the company was posting some of the healthiest profits in its history and asking its workers to accept a permanent two-tier wage system in return. That strike is the fact about him I trust most. It read like a man willing to lose a paycheck he needed over a principle he believed in, not like theater.
He ran against Deb Fischer in 2024 and took 46.5 percent of the vote to her 53.2, a margin just under seven points, in a state Trump carried by twenty on the same ballot. He filed to run again this July, this time against Pete Ricketts.
Here's where it gets genuinely complicated, and I think complicated is more honest than either "he's secretly a Democrat" or "he's a true independent," both of which get said about him constantly and neither of which is fully true. He supports codifying Roe. He opposed the tax and spending bill Trump signed last year, calling it a giveaway to the wealthy dressed up as relief for everyone else. He's been critical of the tariffs, arguing they function as a tax on working families and Nebraska farmers specifically. On all of that, if you lined his positions up next to a Democratic platform, you'd find real overlap, and he doesn't deny it. Asked directly on CNN this August whether he was philosophically aligned with Democrats on those issues, he said: "I agree, I think a good idea's a good idea, it doesn't matter to me where it comes from."
But he's also said he supported Trump's posture on China, on the border, and on what he calls draining the swamp. He backs the DEA's move to reclassify marijuana out of Schedule 1, a position that's put him to the right of Ricketts, who joined twenty-one other Republican senators in a letter urging Trump not to do it. He's aligned with the administration on antitrust enforcement and on stopping private equity firms from buying up single-family homes, two places where the populist right and the populist left have started, cautiously, to agree with each other. I don't think that makes him a secret conservative any more than the Roe position makes him a secret Democrat. I think it makes him exactly what he says he is: a man building a coalition out of whichever ideas actually hold up, regardless of which party filed the paperwork on them first, because he needs a coalition wide enough to win in a state this red, and that coalition simply does not exist inside either party's current platform.
The warts, in full, because I'm not going to sand them off
September 16, 2026. Audio surfaced of Osborn describing Trump-supporting Nebraskans in a private moment, using language cruder and more contemptuous than anything he says in public, ending with the line that their lives "probably suck so fucking bad." He confirmed it was his voice. I'll tell you something that complicates this section: I don't actually disagree with the substance of what he said. I've lived here my whole life. I've watched what a hollowed-out downtown and a closed sugar factory does to a man's sense of who's winning and who's losing, and I think he was describing something true, even if he described it with real contempt in a room he thought was private. That doesn't make it politically survivable. It makes it a different problem than a lie would be. The tape will do damage whether or not the man who spoke it was wrong.
September 23, 2026, one week later. A second clip surfaced, Osborn reportedly telling a room, "I'm going to be senator for six years, everybody else can fuck off." Paired with the CNN admission that he's philosophically aligned with Democrats on several major issues, Republicans have spent this week running both clips together as proof that the independent label is a costume. RealClearPolitics moved the race from toss-up to Lean Republican this week, the first time that's happened since he entered the race. I'm not going to pretend that shift is meaningless. It isn't.
Going back to 2021, resurfacing this summer. During the Kellogg's strike, Osborn said on tape that his union had been in contact with ICE and Homeland Security about replacement workers, hoping the agencies would investigate. He now runs as someone sharply critical of ICE's tactics under this administration. His campaign says he personally only asked a sheriff how such a report should be filed. Maybe that's a meaningful distinction. It's also exactly the kind of distinction that only becomes important to a person once they need it to be.
March and April of this year. A watchdog complaint alleges his campaign and affiliated PACs paid his wife and her consulting companies more than $278,000, including a $114,000 payment two days after one of the companies was formed, plus payments to his daughter and other in-laws. Osborn restructured the arrangement once it became public. That's better than digging in. It isn't clean.
Four separate, documented problems, two of them from just the last two weeks. I'm not telling you the race looks as good for him today as it did a month ago, because it doesn't. I don't think you should have to lie to yourself to vote for somebody. If the only way you can support a candidate is to convince yourself that every criticism is manufactured, every mistake is misunderstood, and every ugly thing on the tape somehow means the opposite of what it sounds like, you're not making a decision. You're making a religion. I don't want a religion. I want a senator.
Why I'm voting for him anyway
Here's the part I actually believe, underneath the electoral math, and it's the same thing I keep coming back to whenever I write about power in this country: I don't trust the chair anymore. Not the man in it. The chair itself, and what it does to whoever gets to sit down.
A Senate seat is a chair.
One vote in a chamber this narrowly divided changes what gets confirmed, what gets subpoenaed, what gets investigated, what gets left sitting in a drawer at the Justice Department eight months past its legal deadline.
And after the recordings came out, I found myself asking a question I hadn't asked clearly enough before.
Do I need to like everything about the man I'm voting for?
No.
Do I need to believe everything he's ever said was right?
Obviously not.
Do I need to believe he's perfect?
Christ, no.
I need to decide whether I trust him with the particular power I'm giving him more than I trust the alternative with it.
That's a different question.
And the recordings, strangely enough, helped me answer it.
They didn't make me like Osborn more.
They made him more human.
That distinction matters.
I don't excuse what he said. I don't think contempt for other people becomes acceptable because somebody said it privately. And I don't think the fact that I understand where some of his anger came from makes the language disappear.
But I also don't believe a crude private conversation tells me more about a man's politics than seventy-seven days on a picket line, a lifetime of working with his hands, a union presidency, a military record, a Senate campaign, and the actual positions he has taken.
It tells me something.
It just doesn't tell me everything.
And after hearing the tapes, I still come back to the same place.
I'd rather take the complicated man I can see than the polished politician I have to pretend I don't see.
I also think, watching the "everybody else can fuck off" clip get replayed for the hundredth time this week, that I'd still rather send a man who spent seventy-seven days on a picket line refusing a paycheck he needed over a principle he believed in than a senator whose hardest sacrifice was choosing which family business to inherit.
That doesn't erase what surfaced this month.
It makes the choice harder.
But harder isn't the same thing as different.
I am not voting for a saint.
I am not voting for a Democrat.
I am not even voting for a man I completely trust.
I'm voting for Dan Osborn.
And after the recordings came out, I am doing that with my eyes more open, not more closed.
The part I won't pretend away
This does not feel good.
It didn't feel good when I started writing this, and it doesn't feel good now.
But something changed while I was writing it.
I stopped thinking of the recordings as the thing that might disqualify Osborn and started thinking about them as one more piece of information about the man I'm actually being asked to vote for.
That's what voting is supposed to be.
Not finding the perfect person.
There isn't one.
Not pretending the ugly parts aren't there.
They are.
Not turning a candidate into a hero because you need him to be one.
That's how you end up disappointed every damn time.
I'm voting for Dan Osborn in November.
The tapes are playing in my head.
The FEC complaint is still open on my desk.
The questions about his independence are still there.
The questions about his judgment are still there.
The questions about what kind of senator he'll actually be are still there.
So is everything else I know about him.
And when I put all of it on the table, I come back to Osborn.
Not because the recordings didn't matter.
Because they did.
They made me look again.
And after looking again, I'm still voting for him.
Maybe that's what an honest vote looks like.
Not certainty.
Not admiration.
Not a bumper sticker.
Just a decision made with all the lights on.
I'm voting for Dan Osborn.
And this time, I don't feel like I'm settling.
I feel like I've decided.
One plain ask, separate from everything above. Pieces like this take longer to report and write than the quick-take version would, and if that kind of digging is worth something to you, a paid subscription is what keeps me able to do it instead of just reacting to headlines like everyone else. No pressure, no guilt trip. Just the honest math of what it takes to keep doing this kind of work.