Independent Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn all but acknowledged leaked audio in which he disparaged Trump supporters, and a second recording reveals him privately mapping out a strategy to hide his left-wing positions from voters.
Osborn, who is challenging Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, appeared on CNN's "Inside Politics with Dana Bash" on Wednesday after the Omaha World-Herald obtained and released audio of a man, sounding like Osborn, ridiculing small-town Nebraskans who back President Trump. Asked whether the voice was his, Osborn did not deny it.
"It sure sounds like me," he told the CNN host. He then added that he did not remember the context of the conversation and called the remarks "out of character." That framing did little to explain the specific, detailed contempt on the tape.
In the audio released by the Omaha World-Herald, the speaker describes a fictional "Billy Bob" living in Red Cloud, Nebraska, a real town of roughly 1,000 people in the south-central part of the state, waving a Trump flag and shopping at a Trump store. The speaker's assessment of that voter is blunt and profane:
"He's been so effective at taking Billy Bob and his wife Mary Jane or Mary Jo and telling them, 'Look, we're winning. You're on the winning team.' And that's all they care about because their lives probably suck so f---ing bad."
The remark reduces an entire class of rural, working-class Nebraskans to rubes too miserable to know better. It is the kind of private elite contempt that candidates spend careers trying to keep off the record, and it landed on the record anyway.
On CNN, Osborn tried to reframe the audio as a conversation about voter frustration rather than voter ridicule. He told the host he had spoken with "a tremendous amount of people" and could not recall the specific exchange. Then he offered what amounted to a conditional apology:
"I've always lived by the golden rule, treat others like you want to be treated, and if somebody was offended by this, certainly I would apologize to those people that might be offended, but I got to tell them I feel their pain. I absolutely feel the pain. We're all angry right now, and sometimes when you're angry you say some things."
"If somebody was offended" is doing heavy lifting in that sentence. Osborn did not retract the substance of his remarks. He did not say the characterization was wrong. He said he was angry, and angry people talk.
He then attempted to align himself with the very voters he had mocked, calling them "disenfranchised" and praising Trump for running "outside of that" political system as an outsider. He added that his own independent bid mirrors Trump's outsider appeal, a comparison that sits uneasily next to audio of him sneering at Trump's base.
The Omaha World-Herald tape is not the only recording causing problems for Osborn. Fox News Digital previously obtained separate audio earlier this month in which Osborn laid out his electoral math, and, more revealingly, the positions he planned to conceal from voters.
In that recording, Osborn described Nebraska's electorate as roughly 50 percent Republican, 26 percent Democrat, and 24 percent independent. He said he would need "probably 10-15% of Republicans" to win. Then he explained how he planned to get them:
"How am I going to do that by f---ing saying, 'Oh, I love trans people, and they should be able to play in sports?' F--- no, Jane, that's not how I win. I win by s---ing on the party."
He went further, acknowledging that surveillance of his public statements constrained what he could say aloud:
"I have people recording me, so I can't say I want to abolish ICE. I can't say those words. I'll be f---ed."
Taken together, the two recordings paint a picture of a candidate who privately holds progressive views on immigration enforcement and transgender policy, knows those views would cost him the race, and has built a deliberate strategy around hiding them. The "independent" label, by his own private account, is a tactical choice, not an ideological one.
Sen. Pete Ricketts, the Republican incumbent Osborn is trying to unseat, responded to Fox News Digital with a pointed defense of the voters Osborn ridiculed.
"I've been to Red Cloud. I've been to every corner of Nebraska. The people Dan Osborn is mocking are the hardest-working people in America. They don't need a candidate who looks down on them. They need a senator who fights for them. That's what I do every day."
Ricketts named the town. That detail matters. Red Cloud is not an abstraction or a punchline. It is a place where real people live, work, and vote, people Osborn reduced to a caricature named "Billy Bob" married to "Mary Jane or Mary Jo."
Osborn's private strategy recordings gain additional weight in light of his campaign's financial backing. Fox News Digital reported in May that Osborn's campaign was predominantly funded by left-wing donors and activist organizations, including ActBlue. The same reporting noted that Osborn had predominantly supported other Democrats' campaigns.
None of that is inherently disqualifying. Candidates raise money where they can. But when a candidate privately says he cannot reveal his position on abolishing ICE because "I'll be f---ed," and his donor base is anchored to the progressive left, voters deserve to ask which version of Dan Osborn they are being sold, the populist independent on the stump, or the man on the tape.
Fox News Digital reached out to Osborn's campaign for comment on the latest audio. The campaign did not immediately respond.
Key details remain unclear. Who recorded the leaked audio the Omaha World-Herald published, and how did the paper obtain it? When and where was Osborn speaking, and to whom? Who is the "Jane" he addressed in the earlier Fox News Digital audio? And did Osborn ever issue a formal written apology, or was his hedged CNN appearance the full extent of his response?
Osborn has not answered those questions publicly. His campaign's silence with Fox News Digital suggests he may not intend to.
Voters can forgive a lot. What they tend not to forgive is a candidate who mocks them in private and asks for their votes in public.
