Meet the Rugged Guys of the 2026 midterms & What happened last night in Maine 8&2SEP24

Democratic candidates Nathan Sage, left, and Graham Platner, right, and independent candidate Dan Osborn, center, are running for Senate in 2026. (Washington Post illustration; Bonnie Ryan/AP; Jerry Mennenga/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock; Graham Platner for U.S. Senate)

 Just as some universities grant students credits toward their desired degree for life experiences these candidates hope to earn enough votes from constituents who share similar life experiences and values and are seeking candidates who will be representatives and senators for all the people of America not just those who can afford to buy their state and federal representatives and senators, governors, presidents and vice presidents. From the Washington Post and Sen Bernie Sanders I-VT. AND PLEASE, if you can, make a donation to Bernie Sanders' 'Fighting Oligarchy Tour' and his campaign supporting bold, progressive Democratic AND Independent candidates across the country, like Graham Platner in Maine, candidates who are not afraid of NOT MY pres drumpf / trump, candidates who will represent ALL the American people, not just the 1%. I donated and hope you will too.....

Meet the Rugged Guys of the 2026 midterms

They’re bearded, tattooed veterans, and they’re running for Senate. Could they help break the GOP’s grip on Washington?

Yesterday at 5:00 a.m. EDT

When it comes to next year’s Senate race in Nebraska, Dan Osborn thinks he has the upper hand.

Specifically his right hand, which was mangled in a machine when he worked at a Kellogg’s plant 10 years ago.

It was a Friday afternoon, a day before his family was supposed to head off to Colorado on a skiing trip. Osborn, an industrial mechanic, was working at a high-speed machine that packaged little cereal bowls into big cases before being shipped off. “Zucaritas,” the bowls read — Spanish for “Frosted Flakes.” His right hand got too close to the work, and the machine pulled it in and bent it in a way hands don’t bend. (“Well, I can certainly send you some cool pictures, if you like gore,” he recently told The Washington Post.) His hand broke, along with his wrist, and “everything else got dislocated.” Five surgeries and 16 weeks later, Osborn was back at work — on the same machine that caused the injury.

“It’s just a machine,” he recalls thinking to himself. “It doesn’t know any better.”

The Washington machine? That’s another story. He’s hoping regular folks would trust him with that job.

“The fact that I’ve worked with my hands and provided for my family, working with my hands every day — I think a lot of people can relate to that,” Osborn, an independent running to unseat Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, said in an interview.

He’s not the only Senate challenger who has decided that his hands were made for running.

In Maine, Marine veteran Graham Platner is running to unseat longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins. “People like to point out that I’m a political novice. I guess that’s true,” Platner, a Democrat and oyster farmer, told us. “I also think that the current situation the country finds itself in seems to have been built by experts, and I’m not super excited about the straits that we’re in.”

Over in Iowa, where Republican Sen. Joni Ernst is set to retire, Democrat Nathan Sage — a former mechanic and Marine veteran — is drawing a similar contrast with buttoned-up establishment types. “I might be a little bit hairy, I might be a little bit fat, I might be a little tattooed,” he said in an interview, “but I’m here standing up, willing to fight.”

Meet the Rugged Guys of the 2026 midterms. They are scruffy, solidly built, middle-aged White military veterans who work with their hands and look like they’re way more comfortable in plaid flannel than pinstripe suits. And they are banking that the antiestablishment populism that Republicans have embraced during the Trump era can work the other way, too.

“Every cycle, there is a different hot candidate profile that everybody’s trying to be,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who has worked for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona). Suburban soccer moms, veterans, self-funders. “This year, it seems like it’s these blue-collar workers.”

Independent candidate Dan Osborn departs an election night watch party in November, when he got a lot of votes but still lost to Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska). (Bonnie Ryan/AP)

The backdrop: Democrats are unpopular and facing a crisis with the working-class voters who once formed the base of their coalition. When Donald Trump won the presidential election last year, he did so in part by winning voters making less than $100,000 per year and also those making less than $50,000, according to network exit polls. (Kamala Harris won the making-over-$100,000 vote but lost the election.)

“To put it a little differently,” says David Litt, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, “One of the divides that is the reason that Trump is president — as opposed to, you know, facing a great deal of jail time — is the political divide between people who work with their hands and people who work in front of a screen.” Democrats, Litt says, are now trying to emphasize that they can work with their hands.

“You’ve got to appeal to the working-class people in this country,” says Doug Sosnik, a Democratic strategist who has been studying the education divide. “Period.”

Osborn has filmed himself in his garage, installing a carburetor kit (and another time posted a photo of his dirty fingers).

Platner showed a gubernatorial candidate how to shuck oysters before an event.

Sage has talked about growing up poor in a trailer park.

All three men are clients of Fight Agency, a firm founded by strategists who worked for Sanders, Gallego and Sen. John Fetterman, the tattooed, gun-owning, hoodie-wearing Pennsylvania Democrat who rose swiftly from small-town mayor to the Senate thanks to his distinctly not-another-politician vibes. The new Rugged Guys’ ads — including sleek announcement videos set against electric guitar riffs — are the firm’s handiwork, according to Tommy McDonald, one of the agency’s partners. Osborn’s announcement video finds him sliding out from beneath a car, wearing denim and holding a socket wrench. “There’s a lot of rich guys in Washington like Pete Ricketts,” the candidate says in the video, “but not a lot with hands like these.”

“Authentic” is what they’re going for, McDonald says — you film at worksites, you keep the tone conversational, you let the candidates dress how they want.

“A lot of candidates have to go to Carhartt and buy a shirt. Most candidates don’t have them,” McDonald said. “These guys have them.”

Nathan Sage does a meet and greet with voters and potential supporters at a brewery in Sioux City, Iowa, in August. (Jerry Mennenga/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock)

Sage’s most recent jobs have not exactly been rugged; after working as a mechanic in the Marines and then as a civilian, he went to college and worked at a pair of radio stations before becoming the executive director of the chamber of commerce in Knoxville, Iowa. But he feels deeply connected to his upbringing in a Mason City trailer park. “We ate the same stuff: buttered noodles, S.O.S., whatever we could make to make it through it,” he said. When he started on his journey in electoral politics, he would complain to his staff about “call time” — the part of the schedule when candidates get on the horn to ask for donations.

“You don’t ask people for money where I come from,” Sage said. “You work for it. You mow lawns for $10. You fix a car for a six-pack. You work for that money. So to have to ask people for money now is degrading for somebody in the working class who’s never done that before.”

Osborn can relate. “I went through my contact list,” he said, “and I’m calling other mechanics and plumbers, and, you know, the people that I hang out with don’t have a lot of money.” For many working-class candidates, this means relying on online and social media fundraising. At the moment, Osborn — who unsuccessfully challenged Nebraska’s other Republican senator last year but ran well ahead of Harris in the Cornhusker State — is still clocking in to work as a steamfitter at a plant in Omaha until his next leave of absence, which is planned for the spring. He says his debt collectors “don’t give a s---” about the results of his last race, or that he’s running again. He spoke to us from an office at work where he can take breaks for some campaign-related calls. Later that weekend, there’d be a state fair and Labor Day parades to attend.

“My job can be pretty hazardous, so I need to stay focused while I’m at work,” he said. “But my race is always on the back of my head.”

Platner says he sometimes has taken calls while on the boat, and people on the other end would keep asking about noises they were hearing. “I’m like, I’m sorry, I’m shaking oysters right now,” the Maine Democrat said. Normally he’d be taking the boat out in the morning, and staying out all day until the evening, but the campaign has shifted things around. His business partner of eight years has picked up some of the slack when he can’t be out all day. The oyster farm is his passion, and Platner says he couldn’t have started it without the government health insurance that allowed him the chance to recover from “symptoms from my combat service” after his military deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. It allowed him to work on himself, he said.

“Everybody in the state of Maine should have access to that kind of support without having to hop over the bar of fighting in stupid foreign wars and watching their friends die,” he said.

Rocha, the strategist, worries about first-time candidates following the advice of consultants who aren’t working-class simply because they haven’t run for office before and think they don’t know better: “When some big consultant says, ‘That’s not how it’s done, you have to do it this way,’” he told us, “rarely do they push back, because they have no reference.” Would the campaigns be able to speak to working-class Latinos — a constituency Trump seemingly made inroads with, and one Rocha says Democrats have overlooked? He had a word of advice for the candidates, in a recent video: Don’t let the media consultants and pollsters tell you how to talk to the voters you seek. “You know more about working people.”

When it comes to winning political races, rugged, working-with-your-hands authenticity has its limits. There’s the words that the candidates speak, the jobs they’ve had, the clothes they wear and the vibes they give off. And then there’s the brand that goes with their name: “Democrat.” “Republican.” “Independent.”

“The most important brand that matters in politics to voters is party identification,” says Lynn Vavreck, a professor of political science at UCLA. “That is the brand.”

The parties are offering very different visions for the kind of world they want to build, Vavreck says. Voters know which of those two worlds they want to live in, and they want someone who will fight to build that world — whether that’s “a construction worker, a schoolteacher, a doctor or even a former member of Congress.”

“It matters very little,” she says, “who that person is.”

By Jesús Rodríguez

Jesús Rodríguez is a political reporter in The Washington Post's Style section, with a focus on features and profiles

What happened last night in Maine

Sisters and Brothers -

Donald Trump‘s move toward oligarchy and authoritarianism has created an unprecedented moment in modern American history. We must respond in an unprecedented way. Status quo politics is not good enough.

We need to elect candidates all over this country who have the guts not only to stand up to Trumpism, but to take on the monied interests of both parties and fight for a working class that has been ignored for far too long.

One of those candidates is Graham Platner who is running for the United States Senate in Maine.

Graham is a combat veteran and an oysterman who will do what Democrats don't often do, which is to give people something to vote for rather than just vote against.

Now you know as well as I do, running as a progressive in this country is never easy. Before Graham even takes on Susan Collins in the general election, he will likely have to defeat the Democratic Party establishment's candidate for Senate in this race.

He will need our support to win both the primary and the general election. So today, I am once again asking for your financial support.

Please use this link to make a contribution of $27 or whatever you can afford to Graham Platner's campaign for United States Senate in Maine. These early donations mean a lot to progressive candidates like Graham.

CONTRIBUTE NOW

Last night I spoke with Graham at a campaign rally in Portland, Maine attended by more than 6,500 people -- a crowd almost three times larger than the last time I spoke in Portland during our presidential campaign.

Here are some photos from before and during the event:

And what is clear to me after the rally is that there is an extraordinary amount of grassroots enthusiasm and energy not just behind Graham's campaign, but there remains tremendous enthusiasm in every corner of this country to take on Donald Trump's oligarchy, authoritarianism, kleptocracy and his horrific attacks against working families.

But no one person can do that alone. Not me. Not anyone else. The political revolution was never about electing just one person, it was about electing progressive candidates across the country with the guts to take on the billionaire class of this country.

So I need Graham in the Senate with me.

I need Graham with me in the Senate to help stop U.S. weapons going to the extremist Netanyahu government in Israel so that we end the starvation of children in Gaza. The U.S. must not be complicit in the destruction of the Palestinian people.

I need Graham with me in the Senate to take on the insurance companies and the drug companies who are profiting off of our broken and dysfunctional health care system, and to help us move toward Medicare for All.

I need Graham with me in the Senate to take on the greed of the fossil fuel industry and to move this country to energy efficiency, sustainable energy, and to help save the planet for our kids.

Mostly, I need Graham to help me take on the oligarchs who control our economy, our media and political system and to help us move toward a government that works for all of us and not just the one percent.

But there is only one way Graham will defeat his eventual Democratic primary opponent and eventually Susan Collins -- and that is if we are in this together.

Please make a contribution of $27 or whatever you can afford directly to Graham Platner's campaign today.

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When we act collectively we have the ability not only to create a dynamic progressive movement, but we will be able to transform our nation and create a government that represents all of us, not just the people on top. That’s the goal. Let’s do it.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

 

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