Dan Osborn, an independent who has vowed not to caucus with Republicans or Democrats if elected to serve as Nebraska’s next senator, will hit the campaign trail Saturday with progressive Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna.
Khanna is the first elected official to campaign with Osborn, who is trying to unseat incumbent Sen. Pete Ricketts, a former Nebraska governor. There are no Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation, making it the most heavily Republican state where the California congressman has campaigned for any 2026 candidate. Khanna has campaigned for Democrats in a growing list of battleground races, including Iowa and Michigan. He says he’s happy to help in any way and indicated he is sensitive to the message his appearance might send to conservative and independent voters.
“I tell these folks, do you really want an Indian American of Hindu faith who’s a proud progressive coming out?” Khanna told CBS News. “I’m happy to not come out and raise the money for you or send an email, but they said, ‘No, we want you to come out.'”
Khanna will be participating in a town hall for Osborn alongside former Montana Gov. and RNC Chair Marc Racicot and former Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh. Both are critics of President Trump: Racicot was rebuked and censured by the Montana GOP after opposing Mr. Trump and other GOP candidates. Walsh, who supported Mr. Trump in 2016, briefly ran against him in 2020 and later left the Republican Party and registered as a Democrat in 2025.
Osborn said the Jeffrey Epstein case brought the panel together.
“We all have very different backgrounds, and we’re not going to agree on everything—no party has a monopoly on good ideas,” Osborn wrote in a statement to CBS News. “But we all share the core belief that D.C. is broken because Epstein Class billionaires like Pete Ricketts are putting profit over everyday people.”
Osborn met with survivors when the Epstein Bookmobile came to Omaha in September, and his campaign frequently describes his campaign as a “vision of a Nebraska built for everyday people, not Epstein-class billionaires.”
Khanna is one of the key voices on the Epstein files, advocating the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act with Republican Thomas Massie and continuing to push for a full release of the files. He says the accountability concerns are why he’s heading to states where “I never would have told you that I would be invited.”
Khanna suggested that the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files speaks more generally to a broader sense of betrayal for many voters.
“In terms of the swing, the slice of voters who feel betrayed by Trump and who could swing to us, the polling shows that this is its single biggest issue,” Khanna said. “It gets to the sense of the rigged economy and the corruption.”
On Monday, the five-term congressman was in Michigan campaigning with William Lawrence, who is attempting to unseat GOP Rep. Tom Barrett in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. He also campaigned with Democratic Senate candidates Josh Turek in Iowa and Chris Pappas in New Hampshire.
Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates Lawrence and Turek’s races as toss-ups. With less than three weeks to go before Election Day, it shifted New Hampshire in Pappas’ favor from Lean Democratic to Likely Democratic and Nebraska in Osborn’s favor, from Likely Republican to Leans Republican.
