Can Nebraska’s Dan Osborn Win Over Libertarians?

Dan Osborn is running to become Nebraska’s next U.S. Senator, and he’s doing it from outside the two-party system. As an independent challenging the incumbent Republican senator and former Gov. Pete Ricketts, RealClear Polling rates Osborn’s race as a “toss up.” Osborn, a former industrial mechanic, union leader, and Navy veteran, has cast himself as a populist outsider taking down the “billionaire Epstein class.” Republicans say he’s just a left-wing Democrat in disguise. 

In today’s episode, Reason Interview guest host Zach Weissmueller asks what led Osborn to, in his words, “reject the notion of a two-party system altogether” and run as an independent. Osborn defends his “independent” label and distances himself from establishment Democrats and the “Democratic Socialist agenda,” which he calls “too extreme.” He also says he hopes to ally with libertarian Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) to rein in mass surveillance and legalize hemp farms, and he explains why he opposes some, but not all, tariffs. Other topics include how Osborn plans to balance the budget without touching entitlements, his concerns about data centers, his views on the Second Amendment and immigration, and his plan to enact mandatory age caps for federal lawmakers, Supreme Court justices, and executive branch officials.

0:00—Introduction

0:50—Why is Osborn running as an independent?

2:02—Where does Osborn break from Democrats?

4:08—Osborn responds to leaked border wall comments.

6:05—Democratic Socialists of America

7:53—Where will Osborn work with Republicans?

10:20—Ending the surveillance state

11:26—Protecting Second Amendment rights

14:10—The Iran war and War Powers Resolution

17:17—The national debt and spending cuts

20:56—Tariff policies

24:47—Data centers

26:27—Age limits on elected officials

28:08—A message for Donald Trump voters

Producer: Paul Alexander

Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Zach Weissmueller: Dan Osborn, thank you for coming on the show.

Dan Osborn: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

You’ve got a legitimate shot of being Nebraska’s next senator, running as an independent. And looking at your platform, it does look like several of your positions don’t fit cleanly in a partisan or ideological block, which is what’s interesting to me and hopefully some of our audience. So tell me, first of all, why run as an Independent?

Yeah, as the sign says behind me, we call it nonpartisan in Nebraska, your party registration. And I’ve been a registered nonpartisan or independent since the time I could register to vote. I’ve never believed in the fact that I have to accept a set of values and principles and reject the other side to be a part of a party. I kind of reject the notion of the two-party system altogether. I think George Washington, the very first independent, he warned us in his farewell address of the two parties and where it could lead and I think we’re there. I think we’re stuck in a two-party doom loop. Neither side wants either side to have a win and they’re not working for the people. That’s what I want to change, I wanna change the game.

And your opponent in the race, a Republican, has said that this whole independent thing is fake, that you’re just an undercover Democrat. And there was a recent article in UnHerd that described you and several others as “Potemkin Democrats”, they say, “MAGA-coded candidates who actually turn out to be conventional liberals behind closed doors”. So, how do you respond to this idea that this is just a strategy to run Democrats with different branding in states where they’re unpopular? 

Where would you say you differ most from your standard Democrat?

Yeah, well, I would have to start by saying that I was recruited by railroaders in central Nebraska, North Platte specifically. They have the largest rail yard in the world to run against Deb Fisher in 2024 because she takes corporate money from the railroads and does their bidding. And she headed the transportation committee that allowed railroads to police their own safety, and now they have death factored in as acceptable. So that’s why I got into politics altogether. I was not, I am not an operative. I’m a mechanic. I was also a sailor and in the Nebraska Army National Guard. That’s who I am. And that’s who I’ve always been. And you know, I’m doing this, again, to give a voice to the people. But, you know what makes me not a Democrat? Well, I would say— I’d say Joe Biden and Harris failed on the border. I’m a staunch Second Amendment supporter. You know, I suppose the list goes on and on, but again, I think really it’s about the money in politics and getting the money out of politics because right now we’re stuck in another war in the Middle East and the defense contractors and AIPAC, people like that, are the ones funding my opponent’s campaign. And of course, he’s gonna rubber stamp another war.

You mentioned immigration is one issue where you’re differentiated from the Democratic Party. There was a Politico report on a leaked tape from July where you seem to call, according to the reporting, the border wall, “a symbol of racism” that “does nothing.” Do you stand by those comments?

Well, it comes from a place of…the fact that there’s no border wall of Canada. And you can put up a wall. And like I said, it’s more symbolic than anything because you can put a 30-foot wall up and they’re just gonna sell 31-foot ladders, right? One side of the wall says, “closed”, the other side says, “now hiring”. It’s about holding the companies like the meat packers that – you know – exploit the labor, pay them next to nothing, and enrich themselves and funnel money into campaigns so they can keep doing it. There’s got to be accountability there. The wall is a piece of it, but I think it definitely doesn’t go far enough.

So what is your preferred immigration policy if you had to boil it down?

I think it’s going to be getting corporations, small business owners, American workers, labor unions, getting judges and lawyers and advocates into the same room and hashing it out and finding a way—an immigration reform that works for American businesses doesn’t undercut American workers, but still allows immigration to occur. Because we know we have..with the Baby Boomers retiring we got a lot of open jobs, especially out on cattle ranches and construction work. We know we need workers to keep this country running forward. 

So it’s got to find a way to work for everyone.

And then one more background question before we get into some of your policy positions that I think might be interesting for our libertarian audience. You mentioned the railroad workers who recruited you to run in 2024. There’s also been reporting again from Politico that the same former Democratic Socialist of America organizer who recruited Graham Plattner to run in Maine was involved recruiting you back in 2024. Are you sympathetic to, this is a rising strain in the Democratic Party, are you sympathetic to the Democratic socialist agenda promoted by the likes of Mamdani and AOC?

No, I think it’s extreme. Again, getting into this to protect workers’ rights is why I got into this and fighting the money in politics. That’s the sole reasons I got into this crazy political-industrial complex, that it is. To hopefully change the game. The Democrat socialist agenda, to me, it’s too extreme. And most people that I talk to as I travel the state—I like football analogies. The parties operate from the end zones when I think most people, politics, land somewhere in the 40-yard line, right? And we’ve had this pendulum over the years. It swings back and forth because the Democrats are in charge – “my health care still sucks.” Republicans are in charge – “gas prices are too much” – and so it’s just this back-and-forth pendulum. It’s got to stop somewhere in the middle and the DSA is not in the Middle.

You’ve pledged not to caucus with either party, but if elected, you know, this could be a very close margin, whoever gets control of the Senate, and that means you could be a decisive swing vote. So based on your policy positions, some of which you’ve hinted at here, I can imagine you voting with Democrats on various labor and antitrust issues. Are there any particular Republican senators on the other side of the aisle that you could imagine working with on specific issues?

Yeah, yeah. The legalization and the industrialization of hemp, you know, and for Nebraska it could be billions of dollars as long as we’re first in, you know, industrializing the plant. You know, this is a plant, it’s drought-resistant, pest-resistent, it pulls heavy metals out of the ground, it could be rotated in for crops for our farmers. And that’s going to help make our farmers money. It doesn’t need to be subsidized by the government. I’d definitely work with Republicans on that. I know Donald Trump ordered the Department of Justice to investigate the meat packer monopoly. I would love to break those guys up to help create…because right now, I’m a free-trade capitalist person. But right now, unfortunately, this isn’t a free market. This is a controlled market by just a few players. We got to break them up to create an economic environment that favors competition, right? Which in turn elevates workers and the middle class. And we’ve done it before in the 1900s. Teddy Roosevelt broke up Standard Oil, and I think we’re there now and we gotta do it again.

Someone, not in the Senate but in the house, who I know has championed that cause maybe from a different angle is Thomas Massie with his PRIME act which is essentially allowing, my understanding, is to allow small beef processors to compete with the big players. That’s less of a antitrust argument and more of a you know competitive…trying to level the competitive playing field, I guess. You also pledged to end the surveillance state in your policy platform, specifically by opposing the renewal of Section 702 of FISA. And that’s what allows the NSA to leapfrog from foreign surveillance to domestic. That’s something Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has championed with Ron Wyden of Oregon for years. So there’s a bipartisan coalition. He’s also tried to prohibit corporations from selling personal data to intelligence agencies. Massie again, has tried to stop facial recognition and Flock cameras from being funded by the federal government. 

Would you commit to allying with libertarian-leaning Congress members on those sorts of issues?

Oh, absolutely, 1,000 percent. Yeah, our right to privacy is apex, in my mind. I don’t like the idea of our government especially using it for nefarious means to spy on its people. That’s fundamentally un-American.

You’ve mentioned, up top, also you called yourself, “a staunch defender of the Second Amendment.” What would you do as a senator to protect Americans’ Second Amendment rights?

Well, I mean, we already have the right, right? So it’s just gonna be continuing to either block legislation, you know, that restricts our Second Amendment rights. Yeah, it’s just continuing to protect it.

You have proposed five-year mental health check-ins for owners of AR-15s, which implies you also want to create a federal registry to track that…

That’s false. That’s false, yeah. What they did is they took a conversation that I was having out of VFW with a gun owner who had a visible sidearm on him, and we were just having a conversation..and I was talking about that conversation. It wasn’t even the original conversation that they said. I was talking about that conversation at another event. And there was a reporter there, they took it completely out of context, and they turned it into my policy. 

That is completely false, and definitely a lie to try to win this election.

Yeah, because I heard the conversation. It seemed that you were agreeing with this proposal, but you’re saying that’s not an official position that you have.

No, no, the gun owner and I were talking about mental health background checks, and we were brainstorming ideas that we had both heard from people and having that conversation. That was it. It was just a conversation. Definitely was not me talking about any kind of policy.

You’ve also supported banning bump stocks, and that’s an issue championed by Susan Collins, who’s in another competitive race. Is that another example of a senator you might team up with?

Yeah, I mean, it’s certainly not tops on my list of what I’m thinking about. You know, again, I’m thinking about Right to Repair. I’m thinking about going in there and immediately starting to figure out consumer protection issues, breaking up the credit card duopoly – Mastercard and Visa – you know, figuring out ways to keep money in people’s pockets right now. The way I live my life. I’m a paycheck-to-paycheck person. And paycheck-to-paycheck people, we tread water. Hopefully we can save up enough money for Christmases and college. But right now with the price of fuel and this war, that’s what’s first on my mind, is trying to bring costs down for families like mine.

Yeah, so speaking of the war, you’re a Navy veteran, you’ve been a critic of the Iran War and called for a Nebraska first foreign policy. What is that?

Yeah, that’s pulling us out of Iran. Like, I’m not anti-war. I understand there’s a time for it. This war has not been explained to me. And we’ve had Nebraskans die in this war. And I think, last count, over 850-some service members have been wounded. Those are real numbers. And besides the costs in lives. It’s definitely the cost at home. So, you know, it’s Nebraska first because we’re getting ready to go to harvest here in the state. We’re third in corn. We’re fifth in soybeans. We’re first in beef. And as soon as this rain stops here, we’re going to be drying out our crops and harvesting. So diesel prices are approaching $7 a gallon. And that’s a real problem for our agriculture. It’s a real problem for all of us who have to put gas in our cars. I mean, I think probably an F-150 is gonna take 140 bucks to fill up right now. That’s unsustainable. And so it is, ending this war in Iran is by default Nebraska first.

And, you know, Trump started the war without any congressional authorization. This is a kind of presidential war-making pattern that’s stretched back over many administrations now. So this is something the Senate could theoretically do something about—if you make it into the Senate, would you vote for a War Powers Resolution or to cut funding for unauthorized military action?

Yeah, yeah, that’s how we do it, right? Congress needs to act as a co-equal branch of government, just like the Founding Fathers intended it to be. And this is a perfect example of not having a spine. Seeing that the damage is caused for, I mean, nobody thinks that Iran should have a nuclear weapon, and, you know, when I served six months in the Persian Gulf, I went through the Strait of Hormuz four times, In both ’95 and 1997. We keep an aircraft carrier battle group in the region for that very reason, right, deterrence, and it’s always worked. And then we bombed Iran to cripple their enrichment capabilities. So I don’t understand, nobody can explain it to me why we’re there right now. The only thing that makes sense to me is the military-industrial complex needed to make some money. You know, again, I’m not anti-war. There’s a time for it where we have to defend people in other nations, but right now, I think we’re at war with Iran for another country. And we got to pull that back.

Another area of interest, I think, for libertarians is, that you have spoken about, you’ve pledged to tackle the national debt, and both sides continually contribute to that. We’re currently at $32.4 trillion in debt held by the public, and your pledge is to do that in part by cutting waste and fraud and partly by not voting for any bill that’s not paid for, which is good. But to actually reduce the debt at this point, that means we need to meaningfully cut spending as well. 

So what sort of spending would you want to see cut?

It’s the inflated spending, right? It’s inflated government contracts, you know, the no-bid contracts, Right to Repair– I mentioned that. Military right to repair is huge. You know, these defense contractors lock us into service agreements. They make their equipment proprietary. So our soldiers and airmen and motor pools and air wings can’t, or air hangars, they can’t work on their own stuff. They’ve got to have the contractors come in and work on it. That’s just, again, that’s costing a tremendous amount of money. And the Pentagon, to my understanding, has never passed a federal audit. They have billions upon billions of dollars in unaccounted-for assets. That to me is irresponsible. I’m not suggesting that we have to cut defense spending or our budget currently, because we are in a war, and I understand the global…the world that we live in and our place in it, certainly. But it is about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. And the Pentagon should not be excluded from that as well.

We’re agreed on the need to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, but that’s only gonna get you so far. I think that the DOGE experiment showed us that. There’s large budget items, and in your platform, you pledged to never cut Social Security or Medicare benefits or raise the retirement age or allow any sort of privatization. How are we supposed to reduce the debt without any reforms to entitlement programs that account for a third of the budget?

Yeah, well, there’s, man, probably close to 80 multinational corporations that are here in the United States that don’t pay taxes. It’s not about raising taxes, it’s about paying a fair share. Companies like Amazon, they funnel their profits overseas, they park them there, they don’t repatriate it back to the United States, so that’s their loophole that they use. Jeff Bezos has his own tax code in the IRS. You know, it’s this pay-to-play world that they live in. There’s no accountability. I mean, the Epstein files proves that, right? This class of people has no accountability to the American people, to the workers that they employ. But yeah, so it’s about the tax code and changing that and closing loopholes. So, you know, if we get the corporations to pay their 5 percent corporate tax, we’re talking upwards of a trillion dollars. That we could use. But obviously we got to end that war in Iran. A billion dollars a day over there is not helping anything at all. So it is about accountability and paying a fair share.

You oppose some tariffs, but not others. Walk me through that, walk me through your tariff policy.

Yeah, I think a blanket policy for anything doesn’t work. Whether you’re talking about minimum wage or whether you’re talking about tariffs, you can’t just blanket it. You know, for example, for the industry that I’m in—plumbing, steam fitting—a domestic water heater is now $600 more than it was pre-tariff war. That’s a big number. The contractor that I work for isn’t going to eat that $600. He can’t. He doesn’t stay in business. So it gets passed on to the homeowner. And that’s just one piece of a home. It’s getting so expensive to maintain homes because of this. So blanket tariff policies we know don’t work. It really hurt our row crop farmers. That’s why they had to get bailed out again. Fifty-two percent of our market for our bean farmers got cut off. In Argentina, or China went and bought from Argentina, because they removed their tariffs. And then we bail out Argentina with $20 billion, their farmers. This doesn’t make any, this does not make any sense. It’s not computing in my brain. 

But we do know targeted tariffs can work for industry. There’s a reason why the trucks that you see on the road are still F-150s, GMCs, and Rams and Chevys. And that’s because of targeted tariffs. So we know some of those tariff policies are beneficial, and we know there are some bad actors out there when it comes to reciprocal tariffs. But this blanket tariff policy, this is a tax on us, and again, that power should be with Congress.

But isn’t, if we’re just saying targeted tariffs, aren’t we giving sort of special carve-outs to certain industries? And also, if you’re running on cost of living, you’re saying that tariffs undoubtedly make the price of goods that people are buying, including cars, go up. So how do you square that?

Yeah, well, it’s squaring it with the manufacturers still being here in this country, right? That’s why the targeted tariffs in the auto industry, there’s a lot of those full-size trucks are still built here. So that’s American jobs, right? The water heater, a lot of the raw materials from the water heater comes from Canada. And actually gets shipped down through the United States down in New Mexico where it gets assembled because too many of our corporations have sold out to Mexico, including my former employer Kellogg’s. There’s two state-of-the-art cereal plants down there that sell to the United States, and they shut down a plant right here in Omaha in favor of cheap labor. That’s a hard pill for me to swallow. So I get angry when I’m understanding what’s really happening there. But yeah, so then it gets assembled, and the water heater gets assembled in Mexico, then it comes back up here. So it’s tariff, tariffed. So having to understand the industry is a big part of it, where everything comes from, whether you’re talking about water heaters, hydronic valves, pipe fittings come from China. And I understand what they say about the blanket tariff policy is about bringing industry back here, but that doesn’t happen overnight either. So we have to build infrastructure here, build the plants before we can start keeping targeted tariffs to maintain that industry.

So some of the infrastructure that’s being built out now here is data centers, but you’re part of the populist backlash against that. You say we shouldn’t give them subsidies, which I absolutely agree with, but if they’re built without any special carve-outs, why shouldn’t they be allowed to just operate like any other industry?

Yeah, I think, well, it’s, again, it is what is the data center being used for, right? And so again, no, not a cent of our tax dollars should be going to subsidize them, and certainly our power bills and water bills shouldn’t go up a cent either if they come to our communities. So that’s the guardrails that I talk about. It is about guardrailing the industry and, you know, we have to protect what we know is good and guardrail from the bad. For example, the data that the data center exists for, is it being used to cause cancer or is it being used to store data for Flock cameras to surveil us? And I know there’s a data center just a couple miles up the road from where I live. It’s a Facebook data center, and the whole reason of existence – and it got subsidized about $2 million of taxpayers’ money to build it – all it does is house the data of deceased people. Why does that even exist? I don’t know. So it is about accountability, transparency on what the data is being used for, how much water are they using, how much power are they using, and community benefit agreements for people who live in the communities that data centers are building in.

You’re, as we mentioned, you’re running as an independent. That is sort of an implicit critique of the two-party system. And you also, interestingly, have a critique and a policy proposal about the kind of gerontocracy that we’re living in, the fact that we’ve got people serving in the Senate, serving in other parts of the government, who are in severely declining physical and probably cognitive health. What do you propose we do about that?

Age limits. You know, there’s an age minimum. Stands to reason there should be an age maximum. I don’t know what that magic number is, but if you turn, let’s say if you’re, if you turn 72, before your next election, you don’t get to run again. You know, that, that, that may, again, just throwing a number out there, but that, that makes sense to me. And then also, you know, no former member of Congress should be able to become a lobbyist too. We need to take the teeth out of these lobbyists. Like, for example, the pharmaceutical industry, 1,500 lobbyists, it’s three lobbyists for every one member of Congress. And, you know, that’s why drug prices are unaffordable. They actually get tax breaks for running all those commercials during our football games. You know, Skyrizi, you’re taking a bath on the beach or parasailing or whatever they’re doing. They get a tax break to run those ads. And that’s what 1,500 lobbyists will get you. So no former member of Congress, because they got all the, they got the Rolodex in their phones, right? Of all the power players that could be effective lobbyists, we should ban that.

Last question, because I know you’ve got to run. Trump is visiting your state the week this episode comes out to campaign for your opponent. He won Nebraska by about 20 points in 2024. So you will need to win some Trump voters in order to win. What is your message to them?

Yeah, I would say, when Trump first came onto the scene, the people that didn’t want him to be in power are the same people that don’t want me to be in power or to have any kind of seat in the halls of the Senate. It’s because I represent an anti-establishment ideas, right? You know, not tearing it all down, certainly like some of those extremes on the DSAs, but it is about breaking this two-party doom loop and operating in the words of Abraham Lincoln in his address, it’s a government by and for the people. You know, those principles that we live off of. Instead, right now, it’s a government for the corporations and the 1% that control our elections through the money. And again, I don’t take the corporate money. So yeah, I would say to those Trump voters, I’m very similar in that regard.

Ok, Dan Osborn. Thank you for talking with Reason.

Thank you. Appreciate you.