Meet the Rugged Guys of the 2026 midterms - WaPo [View all]
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.
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“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.
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