The Iran War Is Crushing Nebraska Workers. Dan Osborn Is One of Them

With the cost of fertilizer and energy inputs surging due to the war on Iran, Nebraska’s farming industry, always squeaking by on the thinnest of margins, is being thoroughly brutalized. The town of Lexington is in free fall amid the closure of a beef processing facility that served as the town’s foundation. And in Omaha, a city where AI severely threatens employees in the primary industry of insurance, anxiety is at an all time high. It’s not a great time to be a politician who’s the son of a billionaire celebrating the virtues of the free market, but such is the fate of Nebraska’s Republican senator, Pete Ricketts, who faces a surprisingly robust challenge from independent Dan Osborn, a mechanic who rose to prominence in the state leading a strike at a major Kellogg facility.

Ricketts, for his part, also claimed to have drawn a short straw when it came to one of the reporters assigned to this article, Drop Site’s new congressional reporter Julian Andreone. As a college student, Julian excitedly celebrated the launch of Osborn’s campaign, forecasting his victory. If I was Ricketts, I’d complain about Julian covering me too, but now that he’s out of school and working as a reporter, let’s judge him by his work rather than a past tweet. They’re probably not super excited about my own involvement either, but Ricketts himself may find something valuable in what Julian found during his recent trip to Nebraska, and we present it below with neither fear nor favor, as they say. And we encourage Ricketts himself, of course, to take the same opportunity Osborn availed himself of to answer questions and make his case to voters. As you’ll see from his campaign spokesperson’s comments to us, that’s unlikely to come about, but the door remains open.

—Ryan Grim

The Iran War Is Crushing Nebraska Workers. Dan Osborn Is One of Them

Story by Julian Andreone and Ryan Grim

OMAHA, Nebraska—Dan Osborn pulled his beat-up 2012 Honda Accord into the Anderson Convenience Market gas station in southwest Omaha. It was May 5, and gas had climbed to over $4 a gallon amid the U.S.-Iran war. But as he filled his tank and the digits on the display surged rapidly higher, a pair of thoughts struck him: His mortgage was still unpaid and he had just quit his steamfitter job two weeks earlier so that he could campaign for Senate full time. He quickly popped the lever to staunch the bleeding.

“For the first time I can remember in my adult life, I had to stop the pump short at 30 bucks,” Osborn recalled. “My mind was floating, then I looked and I thought, ‘Oh crap, my mortgage is coming out this week.’ So I’m like, boop, and I popped it, and I looked at my bank account, and I’m like, ‘Okay, 30 bucks is gonna get me through the week.’”

Osborn is challenging incumbent Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, scion of a billionaire father who founded a financial firm that became TD Ameritrade. Ricketts, the former governor, was appointed to fill the seat vacated by Sen. Ben Sasse in January 2023—a week after current Gov. Jim Pillen, whose campaign raked in a $100,000 direct contribution from Pete Ricketts and roughly $1.3 million in Ricketts family-funded ad spending from Conservative Nebraska PAC, was sworn into office.

Polls dating back to April 2025 consistently show Osborn trailing Ricketts by one or two points, within the margin of error, until a statewide Tavern Research poll this month showed Osborn surging ahead to take a 47% to 42% lead over Ricketts. The same poll from the Democratic-leaning firm had Osborn boasting a +11 net favorability among Nebraska voters to Ricketts’ -7. Days later, a Zenith Research poll conducted only in Nebraska’s first congressional district showed Osborn leading Ricketts by 6%, with even higher favorability ratings among independent voters.

Osborn in 2024 came within 7 points of knocking off Sen. Deb Fischer, the best overperformance of any Senate candidate in the country. The difference in 2026 isn’t just the opponent—the son of a billionaire makes a useful foil for a union mechanic—but also Trump’s war and the pain that it is bringing to Nebraska. “Short term pain, long term gain,” Trump promised recently, once again defending his remark that he does not take Americans’ financial interests into account when waging the Iran war with Israel.

Since the Strait of Hormuz closed, Nebraskan farmers have faced surging fertilizer costs. The price of urea, a nitrogen fertilizer and one of the main inputs for corn and soybean production, jumped from roughly $455 per ton on February 27, the day before the Iran War began, to almost $700 per ton in late April, a stunning 54% spike. Agriculture and adjacent industries related to food production make up 44% of the state’s economic output, according to the Nebraska Farm Bureau.

“I’m feeling what people are feeling. And that’s not ‘authenticity,’ that’s just real, and it’s hard. It’s hard out there,” Osborn told Drop Site in a recent interview in Omaha. “If you’re 22 or 23 years old, you kind of expect it, right? It’s tough. You’ve got to make your way in the world first. But when you’re 51 and you’ve already worked your tail off your whole life, and you’re starting over, that becomes extremely and increasingly more difficult.”

Kennard farmer Scott Thomsen, who grows corn, soybean and alfalfa and maintains a cow calf herd, told Drop Site that normally he and his peers buy fertilizer for the upcoming year in July or August, but they are all now scrambling to plan for 2027 with the uncertainty and costs of the Iran War.

“Every single one of my neighbors, we cut back on urea this year because of the price, which will inevitably impact the yield of the grass,” Thomsen said. “We’re two months away from where we usually lock in nitrogen at a cheaper price and it’s through the roof right now because of this Strait of Hormuz deal. So I don’t know if it’s a situation where we don’t lock in our nitrogen this summer or hope the price goes down or what we do, because the price of corn isn’t at a place where we can hedge our corn crop for ‘27 and lock in our nitrogen for ‘27 and pencil it out to be profitable.”

A Marist poll conducted in early May revealed that 60% of Americans and 22% of Republicans disapprove of President Trump’s handling of the Iran War, with a May 20 American Research Group poll showing Trump’s approval rating cratering at 31% and handling of the economy lagging even further behind at 29%. More than 80% of those surveyed also said they, like Osborn, are feeling financial strain due to prices at the gas pump. Nevertheless, Sen. Ricketts, since the war began in late February, has voted seven times against War Powers Resolutions that would have asserted Congress’s constitutional authority to debate, and potentially end, the war. Once, he simply missed the vote.

Drop Site contacted the Ricketts campaign with a request for comment on the senator’s Iran War voting record. They declined to address it, instead lashing out at Drop Site. “It is reprehensible that Dan Osborn would welcome an outlet to cover his campaign that has served as a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda, including denying sexual violence against women on October 7th,” Ricketts campaign spokesperson Will Coup said.

The Cost of Campaigning

Before he walked into his employer’s office at Grunwald Mechanical for the last time on April 17, Osborn had been squeezing his campaign to unseat his billionaire incumbent senator into the hours before, after, and between his shifts.

He dedicated his lunch breaks each day of his 40 to 50 hour work weeks to “call time,” ringing potential donors to ask for their support. According to the campaign, Osborn has raised roughly $4.5 million to date, with more than $1.25 million of that sum coming from the first quarter of 2026, during which he outraised Ricketts by roughly $200,000.

But that fundraising success hasn’t immediately translated into Osborn’s day-to-day well-being. Now, he’s uninsured, and his wife Megan has started meeting with their bank to refinance the mortgage on his family’s home.

“I need that paycheck,” Osborn said. “My insurance was tied to my employment, so I knew: ‘As soon as I quit my job, I am not insured.’ My family is now insured, since I quit, but I am not. I’m rolling the dice. I was told I could go to the VA, but now I’m finding out I can’t because I don’t have a disability rating, so I have to go try to find some time to do that, and if I don’t get any disability, then I guess I’m just out, which I’m fine right now. I think I can make it to November without a doctor, hopefully. Fingers crossed.”

The average Bronze plan in Nebraska costs over $500 a month. Roughly 27 million Americans, 8% of the population, are uninsured with 41% of those insured qualifying as underinsured in 2025.

Ricketts and Republican-aligned organizations, like the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), have painted a different picture in a series of ad buys, however, alleging that Osborn is using his campaign to enrich himself after FEC records revealed that the campaign and its accompanying PAC had been paying one LLC that his wife co-owns and another she had done work with, recruiting and training other independent candidates to run for office.

Americans for Public Trust, a right-wing watchdog group, filed a complaint with the FEC requesting an investigation into his finances, which led the Osborn campaign to formally hire his wife full time as Director of Operations, a role that comprises the responsibilities that fall within the scope of the work she had been receiving payment for prior. From April to December 2025, the Osborn campaign paid Megan Osborn about $43,000 in compensation, now the family’s only stream of income.

Osborn himself is not currently taking a salary from the campaign, though it is legal for non-incumbent candidates to do so. He is, according to Vilaseca, acutely focused on dispelling any allegations of financial wrongdoing. The campaign has maintained that the method by which they have staffed and compensated team members for their work is not particularly unusual.

“Megan and Dan are a team who are committed to giving working people a voice in our politics,” Vilaseca said. “Megan has helped working class candidates run for office across the country, and she currently serves as the Operations Director for Dan’s campaign. She gets compensated for that work, as any campaign staffer would.”

The accusations against Osborn hint at the added layers of difficulty working-class candidates face running for office. Ricketts, as the son of a billionaire, does not draw such scrutiny.

Changing Headwinds

Osborn lost his previous bid for the U.S. Senate in 2024 to Fischer, a far less controversial candidate than Ricketts, by more than 5 points in an election year that swung heavily in favor of Republican candidates—and, more specifically, against Democratic and left-aligned candidates. The political headwinds, however, have changed dramatically across the country approaching the two-year mark of President Trump’s second term, with costs soaring across the board for working people and tens of billions of dollars dedicated to a new regional war in the Middle East.

Cindy Burbank, who won the Democratic primary on May 12, reportedly intends to drop out of the race to clear the path for Osborn to face Ricketts one-on-one. Ricketts crushed Burbank handily by 48% to 39% in the aforementioned Tavern Research poll. But, when tested against Osborn, independent voters polled broke against Ricketts by a whopping 62% to 20%.

Osborn is betting that his support will increase as the war with Iran continues to put pressure on struggling farmers already up against inflationary pressure and still recovering from Covid-19 pandemic supply shocks.

Bill Armbrust, another longtime Nebraska corn farmer from Elkhorn, told Drop Site that he and his neighbors are experiencing higher prices now and expect them to either remain high or even rise for “quite a long time.” He added that farmers like him are “really hurting right now” because they’ve endured exorbitantly higher input costs on phosphorus, nitrogen and fuel for more than five years now with little systematic relief.

“This [war] is like having your house on fire already, and you turn the water hose on a little bit and you find out gasoline’s coming out of it,” Armbrust said. “Right now, we’ve dug a hell of a hole already. And if we just ended it, not thinking about any of the other ramifications of the fact that we’re already deep into it and what do we do about it, if we stopped it right now that would be the start of fixing all of this, of getting this all put back into some sort of normal. Chaos is the worst enemy to farmers.”

Osborn has focused the blame for this confluence of factors on antitrust enforcement—a throughline, he argues, and the best option for bringing down prices in industries across the economy.

The corn seed and nitrogen fertilizer markets are each dominated by the four largest companies in the sector. Corteva, Bayer, AgReliant, and Syngenta, the four largest producers in the seed market, control 83% of the market share, while CF Industries, Nutrien, Koch Industries and Yara, the four largest nitrogen fertilizer corporations, are hogging 84% of the field. Four companies—John Deere, CNH, AGCO and MTD products—also control more than 60% of the agricultural machinery market.

Thomsen cited the consolidation of the agricultural industry as a contributing factor in the years-long price strain and blamed monopolies for profiteering at the expense of farmers.

“The input prices for farmers have been a huge problem from before this war started, and a lot of that is because the industries we do business with are monopolized,” Thomsen said. “They need to break up some of these monopolies and create some competition for us to buy fertilizer and seed and equipment at a competitive price.”

The same is true in meatpacking, where Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef operate between 80% and 85% of the industry.

In late January, the Tyson plant in Lexington closed down and more than 3,200 Nebraskans lost their jobs in a town with a population of roughly 11,000 because the corporation refused to simply sell the compound to a competitor. Factory workers immediately raised alarm bells about violations of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, which protects rural communities and consumers from abuses of corporate power by making it illegal for meatpackers to engage in any business practice with specific intent to manipulate prices or inhibit commerce.

One day after Ricketts promised to “look into” the impending closure of the Tyson plant roughly six weeks before it ultimately shut down, he accepted a $1,000 donation from Tyson. Drop Site approached Ricketts on Capitol Hill in early February, less than two weeks after the plant’s closure, and asked what he did to try to save the thousands of jobs lost. He responded that Tyson is “not violating Stockers and Packyards,” butchering the name of the law he claimed to be examining, and said “this is one of those things where we have a private sector.”

Armbrust said Nebraska voters choosing to vote down party lines has led to the current disconnect between working people in the state and their congressional delegation led by Ricketts, who he said does not substantively “react or talk about” agriculture.

“I think most everybody voted for Ricketts only because he was a Republican not because they liked him or they liked what he did,” Armbrust reflected. “He keeps talking about [how] the market itself will fix all of these things. Well the government has screwed a whole lot of stuff up right now, and so I have no idea how the market is going to function to fix this.”

The Ricketts campaign did not answer Drop Site’s request for comment on the Tyson plant and the Packers and Stockyard Act.

Whose Ally?

Ricketts, Osborn and his supporters note, has broadly been an ally of corporations in the Senate. In October 2024, Ricketts came out in defense of the Biden administration’s antitrust targets with a letter demanding an investigation into the FTC for “leaks” that he and two Senate colleagues argued “resulted in negative headlines” for the corporate monopolies. He also vehemently opposed the PRO Act, reintroduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders a month after Ricketts took office in February 2023, which would have strengthened workers’ rights to organize in their workplaces.

Before becoming a senator in January 2023, the billionaire also repeatedly opposed Right to Repair legislation as governor of Nebraska, turning complete control over agricultural equipment parts and software to corporate manufacturers and refusing to allow independent farmers to repair their own machinery for lower costs.

By contrast, Osborn is trailed by a paid “tracker” employed by America Rising LLC at nearly every campaign event he attends. America Rising is a GOP-aligned opposition research organization, whose PAC has received funding in the past from billionaire donors like Paul Singer and the Ricketts family itself. The tracker follows, records, and confronts Osborn with oppositional questions. America Rising includes the clips in advertising campaigns against Osborn. (Osborn and members of the campaign often greet the tracker, asking him how he’s been doing and offering him snacks or waters at campaign events.)

Armbrust, a former conservative, told Drop Site he used to listen to legendary conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh every morning in his car, until one day Limbaugh began pontificating about farming and made several statements that “made no sense.” That, Armbrust recalled, is the first time he considered that conservative media may have been deliberately lying to him about other issues too.

The lifelong corn farmer said when Ricketts speaks about issues facing Nebraskans, he sees a lot of the same inauthenticity he came to recognize in Limbaugh and the right-wing media ecosystem more broadly.

“We honestly do not see Pete Ricketts, at this point, understanding farm culture and rural culture,” Armbrust said. “Even though he has been in office long enough to get it, we still keep hearing things that make us cringe.”

Osborn has earned a different reputation among the working voters Drop Site spoke with in Nebraska. Janet Banks, a 16-year breast-cancer survivor and pastor who started working 40-hour weeks in coal mines as a 22-year-old single mother, said she thinks Ricketts is out of touch and she relates far more to Osborn’s story.

“When [Osborn’s] wife talked about him working 28 days straight, I know what hard work is as well,” Banks said. “Ricketts knows nothing about hard work. When everything is given to you, you don’t have to go knock on doors. You don’t have to talk to people. He doesn’t do that. He’s not doing what Dan’s doing. Dan takes the time.”