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Two Working-Class Candidates Launch U.S. Senate Runs [1]
['Steve Early']
Date: 2023-12-09
Dan Osborne, a leader in the 2021 Kellogg’s strike, is running for U.S. Senate as an independent in Nebraska. ,Osborn campaign
The major parties on Capitol Hill like to boast about how much more “representative” their Congressional delegations have become in recent years. But that’s only in the most-discussed categories of diversity—race, age, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Working-class Americans rarely end up in the halls of Congress. Fewer than 2 percent of Congress members had working-class jobs at the time they were elected.
Two working-class candidates hope to improve those numbers next year, by winning U.S. Senate seats in Nebraska and West Virginia, states currently represented by anti-labor politicians, but which were once bastions of a more populist, pro-worker politics.
In Nebraska, former Bakery Workers (BCTGM) leader Dan Osborn is challenging two-term Republican Deb Fischer, and he leads in a poll commissioned by Nebraska Railroaders for Public Safety. Osborn is a steamfitter from Omaha who helped lead a successful strike by 1,500 Kellogg’s workers. They shut down plants in four states for 11 weeks in 2021.
In West Virginia, Zach Shrewsbury is also running for U.S. Senate. He’s a military veteran (as is Osborn), a community organizer, and the grandson of a coal miner. Shrewsbury hopes to replace multi-millionaire Joe Manchin by preventing governor Jim Justice, a billionaire coal baron, from claiming the seat that the corporate Democrat is vacating.
Populist Voices
In their respective campaign launches last fall, both candidates sounded themes once familiar to voters in their home states in the heyday of progressive populism, but not heard much lately.
At a campaign kickoff event in late September, Osborn denounced “the monopolistic corporations… that actually run this country” and pledged to “bring together workers, farmers, ranchers and small business owners across Nebraska around bread-and-butter issues that appeal across party lines.”
While picketing with striking General Motors workers in Martinsburg in October, Shrewsbury explained that he’s “running to win and show that working class people can run for office, even high office. We can’t be ruled by the wealthy elite who don’t understand everyday American life.”
Shrewsbury plans to compete in next year’s Democratic primary, but Osborn is currently collecting the 4,000 signatures necessary to get on Nebraska’s November 2024 ballot as an independent. He hopes to avoid an unhelpful association with the national Democratic Party in a state which chose Donald Trump over Joe Biden by 19 points in 2020.
Osborn supporters in Nebraska unions, and even the state Democratic Party, believe his non-partisan stance may be helpful. According to Jeff Cooley, a railroad union official who leads the Midwest Nebraska Central Labor Council, Osborn’s focus on rail safety and the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, paid leave time, minimum wage increases, and misclassification of workers as independent contractors “offers hope to all workers in Nebraska regardless of political party.”
Osborn’s platform also highlights the need to curb corporate misbehavior ranging from routine consumer rip-offs to Big Pharma price gouging and monopolistic practices in the meatpacking industry which favor big agriculture over small family farmers and ranchers.
A Troubled Brand
Jane Kleeb, a past Bernie Sanders delegate who chairs the Nebraska Democratic Party and serves as an Our Revolution board member, told the local media “it would be very interesting for Democrats, Libertarians, and Independents to all come together with the one goal of breaking up the one-party rule at the top of the tickets in our state.”
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[1] Url:
https://portside.org/2023-12-09/two-working-class-candidates-launch-us-senate-runs
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