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Dan Osborn shows some Democratic ideas can outperform the party

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DAN OSBORN, a candidate for the Senate in Nebraska, has a fable he recounts on the campaign trail. First told by a Canadian trade unionist in the 1960s, Mr Osborn’s version goes like this: “It’s a story about a society of mice that happens to be ruled by cats. The mice are just like our society. They go to work every day, they send their kids to school.” And each election, they pick from a crowd of cats to rule them. Eventually, “the mice wake up”. They realise the problem: it is not that “we’re electing the wrong kind of cat”. It is that “we’re electing cats”. Mr Osborn says that what makes him different is that he is “not ashamed to admit that I’m a mouse.”

The polls suggest he has a small but real chance of becoming a very powerful rodent. In this election, Democrats seem likely to lose their tiny majority in the upper chamber. But in staunchly Republican Nebraska, Deb Fischer, the state’s senior senator, faces an unexpectedly difficult fight to keep her seat. Mr Osborn managed to manoeuvre himself into being the only other serious candidate (the Democratic Party chose not to put anybody up). He is showing that, even in red states, Republicans can be vulnerable.

Speaking in a wine bar in Ashland, a suburb wedged roughly halfway between Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska’s two big cities, Mr Osborn jokes that he is a transplant to the state—he moved to Omaha aged seven, when his father took a job on the railways. He met his wife at high school there, and on graduating, joined the navy. He later served in the Nebraska National Guard on a tank crew, before becoming a mechanic at the Kellogg cereal factory in Omaha, and getting involved in trade unionism. On his first day, he says, an “old Polish guy” told him to join the union. By 2021 he was the local union president, and led the Omaha leg of a bitter 77-day strike at all Kellogg’s plants. After that, in his telling, he was fired—and so ended up running for office.

At the age of 49, Mr Osborn is the picture of a white working-class union man. He dresses almost exclusively in plaid shirts and jeans (claiming not even to own a suit), usually with a naval baseball cap. When he speaks, he sometimes trips over his words—referring at one point to a “Mark Zuckerburger”. Yet there are hints of metropolitanism too. His daughter is a professional dancer in Hollywood. And despite his folksy charm he is unusually willing to talk about policy in detail. One proposal is to raise the cap on Social Security contributions so that workers with high incomes pay more.

Mr Osborn has maintained a studious silence as to where he would sit in the Senate. He claims to have been a registered independent his whole life, and will not say how he will vote in the presidential election. Ms Fischer’s spokesman argues however that he is a “liberal Democrat in disguise”. Her campaign has pointed to complimentary remarks Mr Osborn once made about Bernie Sanders (he praised the socialist senator from Vermont for raising money for his strike effort at Kellogg).

Mr Osborn’s rhetoric has Bernie-ish overtones. “This is a government for the 1% and the corporations,” he said at his event in Ashland. Yet, like many Donald Trump-supporting union members, he has some conservative stances. “There’s a lot of people we don’t want here that shouldn’t be here,” he says of illegal immigration. He argues that the border crisis is in fact engineered by Republicans in Congress: “Senator Fischer’s four big donors are meat packers in this state, who benefit from a wide-open border of undocumented workers that they can choose to exploit for next to nothing.” He also stresses that, despite supporting the restoration of Roe v Wade, he is a Catholic and personally opposed to abortion.

Can it work? Nebraska is now one of America’s reddest states. But it was not always so. The state had a Democratic senator until 2013. Mr Osborn’s advisers like to point out that it was home to William Jennings Bryan, a populist three-time Democratic candidate for president in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like Jennings Bryan, they argue that the Republican Party represents big-business interests. And in Ms Fischer, he has an ideal opponent. She is far from populist, and is much closer to Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, than she is to Mr Trump. At an event for the local Republican party in Norfolk, a small town in north-eastern Nebraska, she rejected a suggestion from one member that Republicans should have been more disruptive in Congress, defending the Senate’s rules and traditions.

If Mr Osborn has a chance, it is because it is the Democratic Party itself, not Democratic messages, that have fallen out of favour, so an outsider taking on the system can win. Even if he fails—still the most likely outcome—his campaign has sent a message that the sorts of working-class voters who have flocked to Mr Trump are not yet entirely sold on his party. The next election cycle may have a few more Dan Osborns. Perhaps they will call themselves “the Mice”.

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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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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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How did the U.S. arrive at its tariff figures?

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a “Make America Wealthy Again” trade announcement event in the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

Markets have turned their sights on how U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration arrived at the figures behind the sweeping tariffs on U.S. imports declared Wednesday, which sent global financial markets tumbling and sparked concerns worldwide.

Trump and the White House shared a series of charts on social media detailing the tariff rates they say other countries impose on the U.S. Those purported rates include the countries’ “Currency Manipulation and Trade Barriers.”

An adjacent column shows the new U.S. tariff rates on each country, as well as the European Union.

Chart of reciprocal tariffs.

Courtesy: Donald Trump via Truth Social

Those rates are, in most cases, roughly half of what the Trump administration claims each country has “charged” the U.S. CNBC could not independently verify the U.S. administration’s data on these duties.

It didn’t take long for market observers to try and reverse engineer the formula — to confusing results. Many, including journalist and author James Surowiecki, said the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries.

Such methodology doesn’t necessarily align with the conventional approach to calculate tariffs and would imply the U.S. would have only looked at the trade deficit in goods and ignored trade in services.

For instance, the U.S. claims that China charges a tariff of 67%. The U.S. ran a deficit of $295.4 billion with China in 2024, while imported goods were worth $438.9 billion, according to official data. When you divide $295.4 billion by $438.9 billion, the result is 67%! The same math checks out for Vietnam.

“The formula is about trade imbalances with the U.S. rather than reciprocal tariffs in the sense of tariff level or non-tariff level distortions. This makes it very difficult for Asian, particularly the poorer Asian countries, to meet US demand to reduce tariffs in the short-term as the benchmark is buying more American goods than they export to the U.S., ” according to Trinh Nguyen, senior economist of emerging Asia at Natixis.

“Given that U.S. goods are much more expensive, and the purchasing power is lower for countries targeted with the highest levels of tariffs, such option is not optimal. Vietnam, for example, stands out in having the 4th largest trade surplus with the U.S., and has already lowered tariffs versus the U.S. ahead of tariff announcement without any reprieve,” Nguyen said.

The U.S. also appeared to have applied a 10% levy for regions where it is running a trade surplus.

"Absolutely nothing good coming out" of Trump tariff announcement, veteran economist Rosenberg says

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative laid out its approach on its website, which appeared somewhat similar to what cyber sleuths had already figured out, barring a few differences.

The U.S.T.R. also included estimates for the elasticity of imports to import prices—in other words, how sensitive demand for foreign goods is to prices—and the passthrough of higher tariffs into higher prices of imported goods.

“While individually computing the trade deficit effects of tens of thousands of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in each country is complex, if not impossible, their combined effects can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero. If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the website reads.

This screenshot of the U.S.T.R. webpage shows the methodology and formula that was used in greater detail:

A screenshot from the website of the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

Some analysts acknowledged that the U.S. government’s methodology could give it more wiggle room to reach an agreement.

“All I can say is that the opaqueness surrounding the tariff numbers may add some flexibility in making deals, but it could come at a cost to US credibility,” according to Rob Subbaraman, head of global macro research at Nomura.

 — CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this piece.

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