New Poll Has An Independent Populist Upending The Senate With A Nebraska Upset

Dan Osborn is flipping the script, and a new poll has him flipping Nebraska’s crucial Senate seat

By Ryan Grim, Drop Site News

A new internal poll shows independent populist Dan Osborn maintaining a two-point lead over Republican incumbent Deb Fischer in a Nebraska Senate race that suddenly holds the potential to realign the course of American politics.

The poll, shared exclusively with Drop Site News, was conducted by Change Research between October 18th and 21st. A total of 815 likely voters were interviewed.

The caveats: It’s just one poll and it’s internal, so it’s expected to lean toward Osborn.

And yet, the survey is in line with a slew of others in recent days and weeks that show Osborn surging ahead of the limp Fischer, and suggest that what she has derisively dubbed “a political science experiment” may indeed be just that, but one that ends up working in the lab. A poll in September found Osborn up by one and one from earlier in October had him hitting 50 percent. The new poll found Donald Trump ahead over Kamala Harris in the state by 14 points. Republicans are confident Trump can repeat his performance in 2020, when he won Nebraska by 19 points. If the survey’s numbers are off for Trump, it could also be off for Osborn.

Osborn was an industrial mechanic at the Omaha Kellogg’s plant for more than 15 years when he led a high-profile and successful strike there in 2021—so successful Kellogg’s later ousted him. Osborn has no college degree and served in the U.S. Navy. He has campaigned as a populist fighter for the working class, calling for a crackdown on corporate power. Though he calls himself “personally pro-life,” he is generally libertarian when it comes to social issues, and supports legal abortion rights. Osborn campaigned recently with Shawn Fain, the firebrand president of the United Autoworkers, who championed Osborn as “one of us.”