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Could a mechanic in Nebraska determine control of the Senate?

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AT MOST POLITICAL events in America, the arrival of the candidate is a big deal. A crowd builds, underlings prepare, and eventually the chosen one sweeps in, shaking hands, waving and generally being the centre of attention. That was not what happened when Dan Osborn, an independent candidate for the Senate in Nebraska, arrived at his event in Omaha on October 22nd to discuss Social Security. Instead, he arrived early, then milled around at the back, looking like another member of the crowd. Yet Mr Osborn has ambitions to achieve one of the biggest upsets of this election: unseating a Republican incumbent, Deb Fischer, in what ought to be one of the safest seats in America.

According to a poll conducted for The Economist by YouGov, Mr Osborn is seven points behind Ms Fischer, 50% to 43%, with the rest undecided. That suggests his chance of winning is slim. It cannot, though, be entirely ruled out. Another poll conducted around the same time for the New York Times put Mr Osborn just two points behind. If that poll is correct, and ours is not, then Mr Osborn holds a significant chance of determining the majority in the Senate. Yet even if Ms Fischer sneaks to victory, Mr Osborn’s run could be consequential. He proves that in the least competitive of states, a complacent incumbent in the Senate can still be challenged.

Mr Osborn’s candidacy has a curious origin story. He entered the race last year after Mike Helmink, a union leader who had planned to run himself, dropped out after being refused time off by his employer, and drafted Mr Osborn instead. Initially he courted the Nebraska Democratic Party, which chose not to stand a candidate, but after the deadline to declare for a primary passed, he changed his mind and said he would run as an independent. That meant forsaking the organisational and fundraising help of the Democratic Party—but allowed him to run his own campaign with his own platform.

It seems to be working. Unusually, both Nebraskan Senate seats are up this year. The other Republican incumbent is Pete Ricketts, a member of the billionaire family which owns the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Mr Ricketts was appointed to the job last year after serving as Nebraska’s governor. He faces a special election. According to our poll, Mr Ricketts is leading his Democratic opponent by 18 points. That gives a sense of how many Republican voters Ms Osborn is winning over.

Why is he doing well? It must help that he comes across as a very ordinary Nebraskan. His only previous political experience is as a union leader who led a strike at the Kellogg factory in Omaha, where he worked as a mechanic for 22 years. Before that, he served in the Navy and in the Nebraska national guard. And he is running a smart campaign, attacking Ms Fischer for backing business interests in the state over ordinary Nebraskans. A union-linked super PAC supporting him has bought inexpensive advertising in rural newspapers and on radio stations targeting voters in Ms Fischer’s heartland with surprisingly detailed critiques of her voting.

His key appeal, however, seems to be his independence. Ideologically, Mr Osborn is eclectic. Like any union Democrat, he denounces billionaires and millionaires and special interests, and wants taxes to rise on high-income workers to save Social Security. But he is also highly critical of illegal immigration (which he sees mostly engineered by the boss class to keep wages down). Though he is pro-choice, he stresses he is a Catholic who opposes abortion personally. At times he compares himself to Joe Manchin, the outgoing maverick Democratic-turned-independent senator from West Virginia. His advertisements go further: one of his latest features Osborn voters accusing Ms Fischer of stabbing Mr Trump in the back.

Our poll finds that most Nebraskans expect him to vote with Democrats if he wins. Of those who say this, a large majority are supporting Ms Fischer. But 17% expect him to be a genuine bipartisanvoting roughly evenly. These voters  are overwhelmingly backing Mr Osborn, by 83% to 11%. That explains the approach Ms Fischer has taken in response. In the final weeks of the campaign, a super PAC that supports Republicans in the Senate has poured money into the state to pay for adverts suggesting Mr Osborn has links to Bernie Sanders (the socialist senator from Vermont supported the strike at Kellogg). In an interview, Ms Fischer says that “he is not honest”. Her spokesman says he is a “liberal Democrat in disguise”.

That message, and voters’ partisan reflexes, should be enough to save her. Even so, Mr Osborn has shown that Republicans can be vulnerable even in the reddest of states. His success hints at how Democrats are struggling with a perception they “have lost touch with the working class and look at working class areas in a condescending way”, says Robin Johnson, a political scientist at Monmouth College in Illinois. Perhaps the party should consider standing aside in a few more red states.

Economics

Layoff announcements surge to the most since the pandemic as Musk’s DOGE slices Federal labor force

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Employees of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) hug each other as they queue outside the Mary E. Switzer Memorial Building, after it was reported that the Trump administration fired staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at the Food and Drug Administration, as it embarked on its plan to cut 10,000 jobs at HHS, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 1, 2025. 

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

A surge in federal government job cuts contributed to a near record-setting pace for announced layoffs in March, exceeded only by when the country shut down in 2020 for the Covid pandemic, according to a report Thursday from job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Furloughs in the federal government totaled 216,215 for the month, part of a total 275,240 reductions overall in the labor force. Some 280,253 layoffs across 27 agencies in the past two months have been linked to the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency and its efforts to pare down the federal workforce.

The monthly total was surpassed only by April and May of 2020 in the early days of the pandemic when employers announced combined reductions of more than 1 million, according to Challenger records going back to 1989.

“Job cut announcements were dominated last month by Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] plans to eliminate positions in the federal government,” said Andrew Challenger, senior vice president and workplace expert at the firm. “It would have otherwise been a fairly quiet month for layoffs.”

However, DOGE has continued to cut aggressively across the government.

Various reports have indicated that the Veterans Affairs department could lose 80,000 jobs, the IRS is in line for some 18,000 reductions and Treasury is expected to drop a “substantial” level of workers as well, according to a court filing.

The year to date tally for federal government announced layoffs represents a 672% increase from the same period in 2024, according to Challenger.

To be sure, the outsized layoff plans haven’t made their way into other jobs data.

Weekly unemployment claims have held in a fairly tight range since President Donald Trump took office. Payroll growth has slowed a bit from its pace in 2024 but is still positive, while job openings have receded but only to around their pre-pandemic levels.

However, the Washington, D.C. area has been hit particularly hard by the announced layoffs, which have totaled 278,711 year to date for the city, according to the report.

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Economics

Trump will ‘buckle under pressure’ if Europe bands together over tariffs: German economy minister

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BERLIN, GERMANY – FEBRUARY 24: Robert Habeck, chancellor candidate of the German Greens Party, speaks to the media the day after German parliamentary elections on February 24, 2025 in Berlin, Germany. The Greens came in fourth place with 11.6% of the vote, down 2.9% from the previous election. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty Images

U.S. President Donald Trump will “buckle under pressure” and alter his tariff policies if Europe bands together, acting German economy minister Robert Habeck said Thursday.

“That is what I see, that Donald Trump will buckle under pressure, that he corrects his announcements under pressure, but the logical consequence is that he then also needs to feel the pressure,” he said during a press conference, according to a CNBC translation.

“And this pressure now needs to be unfolded, from Germany, from Europe in the alliance with other countries, and then we will see who is the stronger one in this arm wrestle,” Habeck said.

Elsewhere, outgoing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he believed the latest tariff decisions by Trump were “fundamentally wrong,” according to a CNBC translation.

The measures are an attack on the global trade order and will result in suffering for the global economy, Scholz said.

On Wednesday, Trump imposed 20% levies on the European Union, including on the bloc’s foremost economy Germany, as he signed a sweeping and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy.

Germany is widely regarded as one of the countries likely to be most impacted by Trump’s tariffs, given its heavy economic reliance on trade.

This is a developing story, please check back for updates.

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Economics

The Trump train slows

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THESE DAYS are dire and dour for Democrats. But April 1st brought a brief reprieve—and not because of jokes. That was the day that the most expensive judicial election in American history in the battleground state of Wisconsin ended in a decisive triumph for the left-leaning candidate. It had drawn $100m of spending, including an estimated $25m from Elon Musk who also, perhaps unhelpfully, personally campaigned in the state. The same day, two special elections in Florida for vacant congressional seats took place in safe Republican districts. Although they did not win, Democrats improved their margins by 17 and 20 percentage points compared with the general elections held just five months ago. Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, staged a one-man protest on the floor of the Senate, excoriating President Donald Trump’s administration for 25 hours straight—a stunt, to be sure, but one that demonstrated proof of life in a party that supporters worried had gone limp.

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