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dan osborn
Why the Working Class Has Given Up on the Liberal Establishment
Billionaires are in control of both parties and working people across this country are not dumb. They are ready for populist change. How do we know this? They told us.
May 05, 2026
You’ve spent 25 years working for a company. You’re proud of your work. Your wages and benefits are good, and you’ve put together a decent life. Then your CEO says the company is heading for some tough times, and that everyone from the executive suite to the shop floor will need to make some sacrifices. You are willing to join with others to help the company survive. You feel part of it. It’s your identity. You will sacrifice if that’s what you and your company need to survive.
But when the sacrifice comes, the price paid is far from equal. You, along with hundreds of other workers, are laid off and are replaced with low-wage sub-contractors.
How would you feel?
I found out when a similar scenario was foisted on 114 food service and maintenance workers at Oberlin College in 2020. Many of them had been there longer than any of the administrators and most of the faculty. Their work for the college was their life, their identity. They cared for the students. They were proud to be associated with this elite liberal institution, wokeness and all. It was by far the best employer in northeastern Ohio, which has had its industrial base decimated over the last four decades.
In 2018, Oberlin’s administration had come up with a PR program called “One Oberlin” to secure the school’s finances, upgrade facilities, and prepare for the college’s third century. At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic the Oberlin community was asked to pull together to make ends meet. But while the financial stress was real, it turned out “One Oberlin” was not: It failed to include the college’s unionized blue-collar workers. They were summarily dismissed, dispatched with a little severance and little else. They were devastated.
We know how they felt because a group of Oberlin student interns interviewed many of the laid off workers. These workers were hurt and they were angry. They saw this very liberal institution as hypocritical, as betraying its values, and as uncaring and cruel.
As an Oberlin alumnus, this was a wake-up call. Although a group of us did all we could to call out the college’s hypocrisy and compel it to save these jobs, we couldn’t get them to consider the workers as part of “One Oberlin.” (We were able to raise about $180,000 from alumni for these workers to cushion the blow.)
That led me to conduct a larger study of the impact of mass layoffs on politics. It didn’t take much of a leap to see that Oberlin’s liberal establishment was very similar to that of the Democratic Party. A declared ethos of caring and positive social values seemed always to stop when budgetary restraints forced a choice between the interests of workers and those of the party’s elites and their wealthy allies.
That turned out to be the case throughout the Midwest, where the Democratic Party’s fortunes have flagged over the past few decades as their “Blue Wall” crumbled. We used demographic and mass layoff data in conjunction with election results and found a statistically solid causal relationship: As the county mass layoff rate went up, the Democratic vote went down between 1996 and 2020. Year by year, voters in areas hard hit by mass layoffs were abandoning the Democratic Party.
Sherrod Brown, the former senator from Ohio who is trying to reclaim his job this year, found that the Democrats are still being blamed for the job destruction caused by NAFTA. After his loss in the 2024 campaign, he said:
The national Democratic brand has suffered, again, starting with NAFTA. My first term in the House [was] when NAFTA was voted on. I led the freshman class of 160 Democrats, and 40 Republicans, give or take, in opposition to NAFTA. I was in all the strategy meetings, all the vote counts. So, more Democrats voted against NAFTA than for it. More Republicans voted for it than against it. But it was seen [as a mark against Democrats], because we had a Democratic president, even though it was negotiated by a Republican, but that’s all background noise now. But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign, about NAFTA.
I’ve seen that erosion of American jobs and I’ve seen the middle class shrink. People have to blame someone. And it’s been Democrats. We are more to blame for it because we have historically been the party of [workers]. They expect Republicans to sell out to their corporate friends and to support the rich. But we don’t expect that from my party…
Our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin found that 70 percent of the respondents have negative opinions of the Democrats. That’s what happens when the Democrats, like Oberlin, bastions of liberal good will, become so cavalier about job destruction.
Can the Democrats Recover?
Everyone who wants to stop MAGA this coming fall, as well as in 2028, sure hopes so. But in the 130 congressional districts where the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more, the odds are slim. In those districts, the Democratic Party’s presence is so diminished it might as well not even exist. And it’s in those districts we need something new, starting with working-class candidates like Dan Osborn, who is running as an independent in Nebraska for the US Senate.
Are voters in red areas ready for working-class independents? Our YouGov survey shows they are. Looking only at rural county data in those four states (the reddest areas), there is strong support for a new party, independent of the two parties, that would run on a progressive populist working-class platform:
Voter Support for the New Independent Workers’ Political Association
- Rural Republicans: 50%
- Rural Independents: 50%
- Rural Democrats” 77%
(For more data and analysis please see my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own.)
A Policy Hail Mary?
If the Democrats want to reconnect with working people, they need to put job security front and center. They need to stop relying on public-private partnerships, which use public funds to encourage corporate job creation that too often fails to materialize. And the Dems need to purge vacuous language, like the phrase “the opportunity society,” which promotes corporate-first thinking that adds to, rather than reduces, job precarity. In fact, they should replace their corporate-first thinking, with people-first thinking.
To do so the Democrats should call for federal job guarantees. They would do well to read Jared Abbot’s review of a compendium of poll data that shows massive support for the government serving as the employer of last resort. People don’t want handouts; they want a chance to earn a fair living. (Even the new “Working Families Guarantee” agenda, put forward by the Working Families Party, guarantees just about everything but stops short of a federal job guarantee.)
But a shift to ensuring people-first job security will not come easily to a party dominated by wealthy donors, millionaire politicians, lobbyists, pollsters, and consultants. Corporate leaders will rail against the prospect of workers having access to federal jobs and thereby forcing the company to bid up wages and benefits to retain and attract employees. Heaven forbid that direct government support go to workers instead of corporations!
Until the party supports job guarantees and runs hundreds of working-class candidates, we can expect more working people to reject the Democratic establishment (and the liberal college administrators) who care so little about working-class job security.
That leaves us with a dangerous political vacuum that is pulling the working class both away from politics and towards demagogues who claim they will trash a system that has neglected so many for so long. But most working people know that genuine positive change is better than destructive change and they would welcome a new working-class party, especially in red areas. They have told us so.
They know that billionaires are in control of both parties, and that they really do need a party of their own.
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The Third Party Spoiler Argument Is No More!
The sad truth is that in 130 congressional districts there is, in reality, only one party, and the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more time after time, that is, if they even run a candidate at all.
Apr 29, 2026
When you write a book called The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power, you provoke a lot of angst in some of your readers. More than a few are still haunted by the memory of Ralph Nader and his quixotic 2000 presidential campaign, good fun until, as many believe, he took the election away from Al Gore, the Democrat, and gave it to George W. Bush, the Republican.
Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler echoes in their minds as this year’s make-or-break November elections approach. Won’t talk of third parties encourage defections from the Democrats and risk helping MAGA? Better, it is thought by the worriers, to bury all such discussion.
Even my friend Bob Kuttner, the astute political commentator, knocks me down with the age-old observation that the “American constitutional system, with its lack of proportional representation for minor parties, makes it almost impossible for new parties to gain a lasting foothold.”
That’s certainly the case when the focus is on presidential races. The story, however, is entirely different at the state and local level, where independent third parties have won thousands of offices and have helped to reshape America. The Populists did it in the 1880s and 1890s, the Socialist Party did it in the early 20th century, and the Minnesota Farm-Labor Party did it in the 1920s. These third parties led the charge to stop child labor, legalize labor unions, and rein in the corporate robber barons. They, not the Democrats, constructed the foundation of the New Deal that elevated the lives of working people.
I would like third party skeptics to take a four-step cure:
Step one: Close your eyes and recall what happens on just about every election night. What do you see about five seconds after the polls close? Half the voting districts in the country flash red. They are immediately lost to the Democrats again and again and again. The sad truth is that in 130 congressional districts there is, in reality, only one party, and the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more time after time, that is, if they even run a candidate at all.
Step two: Admit that in those districts the Democratic Party is ineffectual and therefore the spoiler issue isn’t an issue. Repeat once a day: The spoiler problem does not exist in the 130 congressional districts that the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more.
Step three: Take a strong dose of Dan Osborn, the working-class candidate who is running for Senate in Nebraska as an independent and is doing better than any Democrat has done in decades. Why? In deep red America the Democratic brand is poison, but progressive populism can take hold and grow when contested by independent working-class candidates. Run as a Democrat and you’re defeated before you start.
Step four: Think more carefully about what works. While progressive groups like the Working Families Party do admirable work reforming the Democrats in blue and purple districts, their identity as progressive Democrats makes it almost impossible for them to have any impact in red America. (See Chapter 6 of my book.)
I hope that these four steps make it easier for the worriers to hear the central argument of my book:
Working people are alienated from the Democratic Party and need a political home of their own, especially in red America.
We need to understand the causes of that alienation and how a new political home can be built outside the two major parties without becoming a spoiler in any shape or form.
It’s time to put aside the spoiler canard. In fact, it’s time to get used to the fact that more and more independents are running in red America, attacking both billionaire parties. The Democrats, not the independents, are becoming the new spoilers as they realize that they are now the third party. (See Montana right now.)
You may find other points of contention in my new book, and I’m happy to talk about them all, but the third-party spoiler problem isn’t one of them. Take a look and decide for yourself.
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Investigation Shows How Decades of Corporate Consolidation Have Devastated US Cattle Ranchers
"The marketplace is fundamentally broken," one rancher explained.
Dec 23, 2025
Even as US beef prices have continued to surge, American cattle ranchers have come under increased financial pressure—and a new report from More Perfect Union claims that this is due in part to industry consolidation in the meat-packing industry.
Bill Bullard, the CEO of the trade association R-CALF USA, explained to More Perfect Union that cattle ranchers are essentially at the bottom of the pyramid in the beef-producing process, while the top is occupied by "four meat packers controlling 80% of the market."
"It's there that the meat packers are able to exert their market power in order to leverage down the price that the cattle feeder receives for the animals," Bullard said.
To illustrate the impact this has had on farmers, Bullard pointed out that cattle producers in 1980 received 63 cents for every dollar paid by consumers for beef, whereas four decades later they were receiving just 37 cents for every dollar.
"That allocation has flipped on its head because the marketplace is fundamentally broken," Bullard told More Perfect Union.
Angela Huffman, president of Farm Action, recently highlighted the role played by the four big meatpacking companies—Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS—in hurting US ranchers.
Writing on her Substack page earlier this month, Huffman zeroed in on Tyson's recent decision to close one of its meatpacking plants in Lexington, Nebraska to demonstrate the outsize power that big corporations have over the US food supply.
The Lexington plant employs more than 3,000 people and is capable of processing 5,000 head of cattle a day, and its closure is expected to both devastate the local economy and have a major impact on US ranchers throughout the region.
Huffman noted a report from the Associated Press estimating that the Lexington plant's closure, combined with projected job cuts at a Tyson plant in Amarillo, Texas, could cut national beef processing capacity by up to 9%.
"Ranchers were already dealing with high costs, drought, and years of uneven prices," Huffman wrote. "Now they face even less competition for their cattle. When there are fewer packers active in the market, ranchers have less bargaining power, and cattle prices fall even as beef prices in grocery stores stay near record highs."
Dan Osborn, an independent US Senate candidate running in Nebraska, has made the dangers of corporate consolidation a central theme of his campaign, and on Monday he released a video explaining why he spends so much time talking about monopolies, particularly in the agricultural industry.
"If you're a farmer, your inputs, your seed, your chemicals, you have to buy from monopolies," he said. "Sygenta, Chinese-owned company you've got to buy your seed from, they control and manipulate that market. And then when your production's over and you're selling it, you're selling it to monopolies as well."
Want to know why I talk about MONOPOLIES all the time? This is why. 👇 pic.twitter.com/MuYh0gZRVr
— Dan Osborn (@osbornforne) December 22, 2025
Osborn said that the trend of industry consolidation wasn't just limited to agriculture, but is now moving forward with major railroad and media mergers.
"We need to create an economic environment in this country that favors competition," he said. "That's what a free market is. A free market isn't three or four big people or big corporations controlling everything."
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