Julian Andreone Reports Back From Nebraska: Dan Osborn's Senate Race and Fertilizer Crisis

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Julian uh our colleague has just joined as well too. So Julian's been doing some of the reporting that we were discussing earlier myself about the very uh quickly incoming impacts of the straight of hormones closure on people in the United States. I'll say by way of introduction uh you know people at the start of this war often said that this war was unthinkable uh because the economic impacts and we think of oil coming out of the Persian Gulf and that is very important oil and gas uh helium you know tech manufacturing and so forth but I think maybe the most important potentially uh impact is going to be the fertilizer impact and fertilizer impact is not felt for very very long time down the road because you know obviously planting season doesn't have instantaneously. There's a month's uh time lag and so forth. But Julian, you were in Nebraska and you were reporting on the impacts today on farmers in Nebraska of the shutdowns of fertilizer and fertilizer inputs uh from that region. Tell us a bit about what you were doing and what you found on that trip. Yeah. So, while I was in Nebraska, I met with a bunch of uh corn uh and uh soybean uh farmers uh who were really feeling the cost not only with the fertilizer because 30 there's been a 30% increase in the price of ura which is the main ingredient in nitrogen uh fertilizer and the straight of hormuse closure has bottled up 50% of the world's trade of ura. Uh but they're also feeling it in terms of fuel costs because not only do they have to fill up their vehicles uh but they also have to fill up the massive machinery on their farms. Uh so everybody on the ground is feeling it. And I talked to these farmers who they and their friends a lot of them were uh you know three-time Trump voters and they said that almost all of them are really frustrated because the president promised them on the campaign trail no new wars and America first. And now we've got a new massive regional war and Americans are feeling it on the ground. Everything that comes into the farm comes in via truck. There's a semi-truck that brings it in and everything that goes out of the farm goes out via truck and those trucks, the semis have to fill up their gas tanks too. So the fuel cost is passed on down uh to the producer uh being the small family farmers.

[00:02:16]Julian, while you were there, you also spent a lot of time with insurgent Senate candidate Dan Osborne. Can you talk a bit about what his race is looking like? I know that he's going against a self-funded billionaire, the current Senator Rickettts, that and how the war has also impacted maybe his campaign as well. Yeah, recent poll came out yesterday from, you know, full disclosure, a left-leaning pollster, but had Osborne up five points and uh Rickettts's, uh, you know, um, uh, Rickettts's numbers with independence going all the way down, I believe it was 60 to 22% where Osborne was leading with independent voters. Uh so you're seeing some of that messaging about the war, about costs, about fuel prices and fertilizer prices, but also about monopolies uh in the agricultural industry and monopolies elsewhere, vertical integration in the health care system um paying off. When I was embedded with the Osborne campaign for three days there uh in Nebraska, we traveled from Omaha to Lincoln uh to CIT and uh he held a number of town halls and meet and greets and coffee shops and uh schools and things of the sort on the university campus in Lincoln. uh and uh we were hearing a lot of the same things whether people were pro Osborne or anti- Osborne a lot of the same issues and policies that they were looking for which was breaking up consolidation in the industries that are touching their lives. Uh and they're feeling it in their pockets. Rickettts, as you said, is a self-funded billionaire. Um he's going to have a lot of corporate money behind him from the NRSC, but also from just independent corporate backers. And then he's going to probably start to pour in some of his own money into this race here, especially as these numbers start to favor Osborne. It's going to be a close race. Today we have uh primaries in Nebraska. Uh and there is a Senate primary. Actually, we're going to write about it here uh in the newsletter shortly. We're going to do a long Twitter post so some of you guys can go check that out. Uh but uh there is a Democratic Senate primary. Osborne, of course, is not included because he's an independent candidate, but there's a candidate who a lot of people in Nebraska think was installed by or propped up by uh Pete Rickettts because uh only months ago he went to a conservative leadership forum or training uh that was held by the Nebraska GOP. He's a pastor. He's a three-time Trump voter. He talks a lot about um the Islamist and Marxist takeover of the United States. But now he's running as a Democrat in the Democratic primary. He's been questioned by CNN and other uh sources about whether he's loyal to Rickettts and he's skirted the question, but I think all of the proof is in the pudding. And the Democratic party in Nebraska is uh asking folks to vote for a different woman who has privately signaled and who the Nebraska party has sent out emails saying that she's going to drop out if she wins to clear the field uh for Osborne. That was reported in the New York Times yesterday. So, um it's becoming really controversial in and sort of uh chaotic in in Nebraska right now. But the one thing that's sort of um sort of rising rising in the tide above all of it is that this independent candidate Dan Osborne is speaking to people on both sides with sort of distinctly populist values.

[00:05:18]You know, Julian, one thing you mentioned which is really interesting to me is that people who were Trump supporters uh previous elections are particularly angry about the economic impacts but also the connecting it to the war itself and I was curious about that because uh you know I was uh mentioning earlier I was traveling in Singapore and Malaysia last month and people were very aware that the war was was driving their economic uh you know dislocation. That was really you could feel it that moment right there. But you did you find that in your travels that people were specifically clued into the stray of Hormu situation and how it was directly driving that and you were even thinking of Trump's broken campaign promises. That was something you you saw directly in your conversations.

[00:05:59]>> 100%. I mean these farmers know exactly how their operations work. They're far more educated than any of us who read about it in these uh outlets. They know exactly how the operation works from production uh uh to uh bringing it to market and uh they know what's bottling up the resources that they need in order to uh survive because at the end of the day they're feeding their families with this and they they need these costs to go down so that they can buy their supply for the next year of farming.

[00:06:26]Remember this is not like a week-toeek thing where they buy uh fertilizer for a week and then the prices may go down.

[00:06:32]No, they're buying year-long supply and if the prices are too high when they need to buy their year-long supply and they're out of fertilizer and they need to keep their operations running, it's going to screw them for the whole year.

[00:06:41]But I was talking to some of these farmers. One of them told me he's so fed up that he's considering either two options for the for this upcoming midterm election. either he's going to sit out the election and not vote for anybody or uh he's going to vote against every single incumbent on the ballot regardless of party because he's so frustrated with the way that elected leaders are serving right now. So he's saying anybody who's not in office right now, let's get them in there in place of who's in there.

[00:07:11]That's really fascinating and you know it's interesting because they are at the front line in a way of seeing the impact of this because you know me and myself were talking a lot of people in the broader society have yet to make the connection. They're seeing gas prices go up, but the impacts have not manifested for at least Americans yet in this very uh significant way, but it's coming. And you know, I was cur c curious, you know, you were talking to these farmers and they have a sense of the lead times of these uh you the way impacts hit.

[00:07:40]Obviously, fertilizer, it's related to planting season. Uh you need it at a certain time of year and then the crops don't give off until later in the year and so forth. Did you get a sense of what people were forecasting uh about the imp impact on them as farmers but also potentially food prices more broadly uh if they don't have the inputs they get in time or they're not priced at economical level?

[00:08:02]>> I'm glad you mentioned that because that's what they were talking about.

[00:08:04]They were saying not only are they worried for themselves, but they're worried about the prices that are going to be passed on to consumers. you all of the food that's created on their farms comes to our plate at a certain point and these prices are passed on and passed on because not everybody can deal with the inflation and taking the hit themselves. Um you know I think I think a lot of these guys at the end of the day really want to they they they feel a sense of service to the country. They think that or they believe rightfully that what they're producing is keeping the country going in terms of putting food on people's plates and they want that food to be affordable. They don't want it to only be for uh wealthy people to eat, you know. And I think that they're frustrated that that that they're going to have to pass these costs on. They're feeling it in their own pockets, but they know that everybody else is feeling it, too. You know, it's funny. While I was trailing around uh Dan Osborne, he was telling me about some of the effects on him because he's a working-class guy. He only he only quit his job as a steam fitter two weeks ago. He was squeezing this campaign uh into sort of the margins of a working-class lifestyle. He was working 40 to 50 hour weeks. uh and he was taking uh hour-long uh lunch breaks to do call time, calling donors and potential voters. And he was saying when he quit his job to to go allin on this uh Senate campaign, and we're going to talk about it in this exclusive article I have coming out uh this week on my trip to uh about my trip to Nebraska, but uh he was talking about the fact that he lost his health insurance and also he's having to refinance the mortgage on his home. His wife is meeting with their bank and he's looking at credit unions to meet with. I mean, people are really feeling this all the way from the ground to the guy who might be the senator for the state. Um, almost everybody except Rickettts actually because he's a billionaire and he can foot the cost and in fact, he doesn't even really need to fill up his tank or anything like that. He gets driven around uh DC by his staff. Uh so uh I think uh Osborne's really feeling it and so are all of his uh potential voters or constituents and uh and yeah I think people are going to feel it too outside of Nebraska, outside of farming towns when that cost is uh passed down to the consumer.

[00:10:05]>> Did you feel like whenever you were going to those town halls, what was the range of demographics that you were seeing? Were you seeing different ages?

[00:10:13]Were you seeing different races? What kind of people were showing up? Yeah. I mean, it was a multi-racial and and you know, uh it was it was multi-racial, multi-thnic, uh several ages. There were a lot of older, you know, it's one thing I found amazing just personally, like uh we were in these rooms and there were like a lot of older white folks and they were asking him about Medicare for all.

[00:10:34]And so you have you see these like 70 70 some odd year uh old uh you know, white folks in a in a R plus 20 state and they're asking him whether he would support a transition to a universal healthcare program. So, we're seeing this shift more towards populist economic beliefs on the ground. Things that would be considered radical if you were to tune on a turn on uh corporate media uh any of the outlets right now.

[00:10:56]I'm sure they're talking about how radical and ridiculous these ideas are, but almost everybody wants them. The most recent poll on Medicare for all countrywide um was in I believe November of 2025 and it showed that 65% of Americans and around 20% of Republicans are in favor of a universal healthcare system in this country. And I think that I was seeing those types of trends on the ground. Uh people talking about antitrust enforcement and antitrust law.

[00:11:21]If you heard any of the big names in corporate media or in private industry talking about Lena Khan uh over the last four years, they would have told you she was insane and she was anti- business and her policies weren't good for people on the ground. Well, I went to go talk to people on the ground and they loved what she was doing because they don't want monopolies controlling our society and they don't want the people who profit from those monopolies donating money to our politicians and buying off policy for future years. It's time for workers to have a voice up on Capitol Hill again. And I think that that's not me saying that. That's just me echoing what I heard uh in Nebraska.

[00:11:54]>> You know, that's really fascinating, Julian. And it can be hard to draw a broader uh you know trend out of a specific incident but I think that you you were in what you described uh locality where there was very strong support for Trump in previous years and do you get a sense that that's trans transformed in sense of betrayal because you know talking to people myself like people I know who support Trump or who were sympathetic they feel very angry actually because he seems like he actually governed in a manner which is not just uh something they disagree with but it was diametrically opposite to what he campaigned on in 2024. He said that they were not going to have not just wars in in general, but not wars in the Middle East and specifically not a war with Iran. In fact, he campaigned against this particular war. And now he's saying things such like, oh, if gas prices go up, who cares? It's a paraphrase, but he said said that numerous occasions. Uh, meanwhile, the impact of that's being felt by uh people in the country and particularly his voters. uh did that you think that there's a broader trend that this may manifest in the midterm elections uh based on your experience that people may see a broader backlash against Trump or Trumpism manifesting for these reasons.

[00:13:02]>> Yeah, absolutely. I mean I talked to a number of Trump voters on the ground actually who were in favor of the war and were uh but that's only a small section of them. And I was talking to the farmer who told me he was planning on voting out all incumbents and he was saying all of the people he knows who are uh Trump voters are in one of two camps, right? They're three-time Trump voters and they're in one of two camps.

[00:13:21]They recognize, almost all of them, even the ones who are in the camp that's supportive of the war, recognize that the war isn't exactly good right now, but they're hoping that Trump is going to fix it in the future. They're just holding out hope. Oh, if you just give him one more day, one more week, one more month, he's going to fix it. He always does. He's going to fix it. Uh, and he was saying that the people in the other camp are starting to recognize, wait, sometimes he doesn't always fix it. Sometimes he promises to do something and then hopes that you forget. And I think this is one of those cases. I know that you were talking about Trump saying that the gas prices are going to go up and who cares. And he said something along the lines of like uh somebody a reporter was asking him about the fact that gas was at uh you know 102 uh a barrel or something. And he was saying well I thought it was going to shoot up to 200 and that would have been unprecedented. 150 would have been unprecedented. But he's trying to sort of gaslight people into thinking that what they're experiencing or what they're seeing with their own eyes or what they're feeling in their own pocketbooks is not the reality. But I think some people are starting to grow wiser to it. So you've got that section of the Trump voters who are quite, you know, staunch and some people would call it a little cultish. Uh regardless of what he does, they're going to get on board. But that portion of the base is dwindling in numbers and percentage.

[00:14:38]We're seeing the other portion of the base start to sort of look around and say, "Whoa, this is not sustainable."

[00:14:45]>> Thanks so much, Julian. And everybody will have more insight into his Was it three days in Nebraska that you were in the farms? How long were you there?

[00:14:54]>> Uh, got there Wednesday night and got back Sunday morning. So, four nights.

[00:14:59]Yeah. Yeah. I got to know the state quite well. I enjoyed it.

[00:15:02]>> We got to get you back yelling at Federman now. He's terrorizing.

[00:15:07]He might be yelling at me. He recently brought up Dropsite in an interview with a guy who wasn't He's seeing us in his dreams. He brought up Dropsite in an interview with a guy who wasn't even drop site. He's like, "Oh, we'll tell your boss at drop site." It's like, "Well, that's not one of our guys, but appreciate the shout out. Thanks, John.