A Different Squad

Most successful service candidates quickly become part of the bi-partisan status quo in Washington about many issues, including corporate backing of their campaigns.

One leading illustration is the career trajectory of Ruben Gallego, an Iraq war veteran from a working-class Latino immigrant background from Arizona. As a House member, he was a defender of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and signed a Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren–backed “End the Forever War” pledge, circulated by Common Defense, a progressive veterans’ group.

When the former Marine geared up for his successful run for the Senate last year, he let his membership in the House Progressive Caucus lapse, claiming that its dues had become too high. After that drop out, Gallego’s votes on anything related to US support for Israel’s war on Gaza got progressively worse.

Gallego ended up winning his Senate race with the help of wealthy backers seeking less regulation of crypto currency; their “independent expenditures” on him alone exceeded $10 million last year. Total crypto industry spending on his campaign, Slotkin’s, and others involved in tight 2024 races was $130 million.

That industry investment paid off this year when Gallego and Slotkin joined sixteen other Senate Democrats in voting for the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act. As Massachusetts Senator Warren warned, this Trump-backed legislation provides inadequate protections for consumers and the banking system, while allowing tech companies to issue their own private currencies and “take control over the money supply.”

The Paycheck Populist

Osborn, a Navy and National Guard veteran from Omaha, Nebraska, has already proven it’s possible to become a viable candidate without a Harvard degree, like Gallego, or any other kind of professional-managerial-class background. The former union local president and Kellogg’s strike leader bypassed his state’s 2024 Democratic primary and ran as a labor-backed independent. To the shock of many, Osborn garnered 47 percent of the vote in a red state that Kamala Harris lost 59 to 39 percent in last November.

Osborn’s challenge to Republican Deb Fischer, a corporate-funded, two-term Trump-loving incumbent, was initially given little chance of success, even without a Democratic Party vote-splitter on the ballot. When Osborn recently announced his second run for the Senate as an independent, the state party again wisely and helpfully bowed out of the race (although any Nebraskan could still grab its November 2026 ballot line by entering and winning an otherwise uncontested primary).

His new sparring partner is “Wall Street Pete” Ricketts, a former governor and ultrarich Republican businessman who voted for President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” in July. According to Osborn, that second-term legislative triumph provided an “historic tax cut for the 1 percent,” while taking billions “away from social services and health care for hard working people” dependent on Medicaid.

On the campaign trail, Osborn is again blasting both major parties for being “bought and paid for by corporations and billionaires. And like other progressive, labor-oriented vets profiled below, he’s highlighting the gross underrepresentation of workers in a congressional “country club full of Ivy League graduates, former business execs, and trust fund babies.”

A Citizens United Critic

Osborn’s 2024 campaign did not go unnoticed in neighboring Iowa by forty-year old Nathan Sage. He’s a working-class veteran of the Marines and the Army who served three tours of duty in Iraq and went to college on the GI Bill. Before anyone else thought MAGA Republican Joni Ernst might be vulnerable at the polls in 2026, Sage declared his candidacy for her Senate seat.

Raised in an Iowa trailer park by a factory worker father and nursing assistant mother, Sage began hammering Ernst even before her infamous April 2025 town hall meeting comment about federal budget cuts not being such a threat to the longevity of the poor since “we all are going to die.” After a popular backlash, other Iowa Democrats holding current state or local elected offices joined the fray, making for a crowded primary field in 2026 for what is now an open seat, because Ernst decided not to run for reelection.

None of Sage’s rivals for the nomination share his singular orientation as a “voice for every Iowan who struggles to get by.” The former radio station news director and now small-town economic development promoter is a fierce critic of big business. His campaign platform targets insurance industry rip-offs, big pharma abuses, price gouging by private equity–owned health care providers, and VA privatization.

“People understand that government’s not working for us,” Sage told us. “We’re the richest country in the world, and over 60 percent of our population lives paycheck to paycheck. . . . We’ve got to get big money out of politics, by overturning Citizens United, so elections are not just a pay-to-play scheme and more working-class people actually have a chance to win.”

A Gaza War Foe in West Virginia

Like Osborn, former Marine Zach Shrewsbury launched his second run for the Senate, after losing to a different Republican in 2024. Like Sage, he decided to take the Democratic primary route. If successful on that hostile terrain, he would be up against incumbent senator Shelley Moore Capito, whose family, he says, “has ruled West Virginia for decades like feudal lords passing power down like heirlooms while our towns crumbled and our people suffered.”

Shrewsbury’s grandfather was a union coal miner, but he grew up in a Republican family. After military service abroad, he became an organizer for Common Defense and got involved in progressive electoral politics and then environmental justice campaigning in a state long plagued by poverty and pollution. His current project is Bluejay Rising, which integrates voter registration and community engagement with much-needed mutual aid initiatives.

As a Senate candidate, Shrewsbury will again draw on his military background to speak about how billions of taxpayer dollars that could be better spent at home have helped fund Israel’s “illegal, immoral, and massive attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure . . . to drive Palestinians out of Gaza.”

The Oysterman Against Oligarchy

When forty-one-year-old Graham Platner, who works as an oyster farmer, announced his challenge to incumbent Republican senator Susan Collins, he declared that the enemy of the vast majority of Americans “is the oligarchy.” Like Osborn, Sage, and Shrewsbury, Platner is taking direct aim at the big money in politics deployed by “the billionaire class” to thwart much needed change.

“Why can’t we have universal health care like every other first-world country?” he asks. “Why are we funding endless wars and bombing children? Why are CEOs more powerful than unions? We’ve fought three different wars since the last time we raised the minimum wage.”

On his campaign website, the Marine Corps and Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan has pledged to support Medicare for All, protect Social Security, push for a “billionaire minimum tax,” a regulatory crackdown on polluters, and “urgent action on climate change.” “Nobody I know around here can afford a house,” Platner says. “Health care is a disaster, hospitals are closing. We have watched all of that get ripped away from us.”

At a Labor Day rally in Portland, Platner welcomed the endorsement of Senator Bernie Sanders and told a cheering crowd of 6,500 that “our taxpayer dollars can build schools and hospitals in America, not bombs to destroy them in Gaza.” In a social media post the next day, he doubled down on that message, saying: “It’s not complicated. Not one more taxpayer dollar for genocide.”

This did not go down well with seventy-five-year old Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. He strongly urged termed-out Maine governor Janet Mills, a seventy-eight-year-old ready for retirement from politics, to join the Senate primary race. Platner is polling well against Mills so far. In the first quarter since announcing his campaign, he’s raised more than $3 million, with strong small-donor support.

He’s also drawing large and enthusiastic local crowds of people who want to send someone to Washington who is not another geriatric “moderate,” like the nearly seventy-four-year-old Collins (who embraces that same label as a Republican). As Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic has documented, the resulting corporate Democratic/Maine Republican Party attempts to discredit Platner, by cherry-picking ten years of uninhibited Reddit posts, have led some mainstream media outlets to “simultaneously portray him as a bigoted far-right reactionary and a dangerous left-wing radical.”

Marcetic’s verdict on the candidate rings true of all the others profiled here as well: “He resembles millions of Americans — including some of the exact voter demographic that American liberals say they want to win back, yet seemingly can’t help but vilify.”

A Union Defender in North Carolina

Consider, for example, a similar rough-edged guy named Richard Ojeda. Down in North Carolina, this fifty-five-year-old former Trump voter — now an archenemy of the president — is a fiery ex-paratrooper, two-time Bronze-star winner, and veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ojeda began his twenty-five-year career in the Army as an enlisted man, then went through officer training after completing college; he retired with the rank of major. In 2016, Ojeda  — soon to become a Democratic state senator in West Virginia — voted for Sanders in that state’s Democratic presidential primary. But, in the general election that year, he thought that Trump — as a political outsider, like Sander — was more likely to “drain the swamp” in DC than Hillary Clinton.

Two years later, Ojeda became the West Virginia politician most supportive of the pay and benefit demands of the twenty-five thousand public school teachers who staged an illegal statewide walkout. He spoke on the strikers’ behalf at rallies throughout the state and, inspired by their “red-state revolt,” decided to take his own populist working-class politics to Congress via an uphill fight against right-wing Republican Carol Miller. During Ojeda’s 2018 campaign against her, he expressed public regret for his Trump vote two years before and denounced him as a tool of corporate lobbyists who only “took care of the people he’s supposed to be getting rid of.”

Ojeda’s own congressional race became so unexpectedly close that Trump had to make personal appearances on his opponent’s behalf. During that visit to West Virginia, the president made a point of pronouncing Ojeda’s last name with an affected Hispanic accent, as a way of mocking him. Miller ended up winning, but Ojeda’s 44 percent of the vote — garnered with little national Democratic Party support — was a thirty-two-point improvement over the performance of the Democrat running in the same district two years before. According to FiveThirtyEight, Ojeda outperformed his district’s partisan lean by 25 percent, the strongest showing for a nonincumbent anywhere in the country that November.

After that loss, Ojeda moved to North Carolina, where he is attempting a political comeback as a Democratic primary candidate in the state’s nineth congressional district. Ojeda’s current campaign against Rep. Richard Hudson, a well-connected House Republican, has raised over $1 million from 20,000 donors contributing an average of $16 each.

Ojeda strongly defends the rights of immigrants and workers, supports public education and Medicaid expansion rather than cuts, and warns his fellow vets against Department of Government Efficiency–driven threats to jobs and services at the VA. On that last front, his campaign took the unusual step of collecting 90,000 signatures on a petition protesting Trump administration attacks on VA patients and their unionized caregivers.

Then Ojeda personally delivered the petition to agency officials in Washington and demanded that VA secretary Doug Collins “reject the unlawful executive order by Trump which rips out long-standing civil rights protections and opens the door to denying VA care based on marital status, sexual orientation, religion, or even voting for a Democrat.”

On the campaign trail, Ojeda finds encouraging signs that others who once voted for Trump (as he did in 2016) are having second thoughts as “they look around at the wreckage so far, the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] kidnappings, the censorship, and the economic pain.” More people, he believes, “are realizing that they were pawns in the oldest con in the book — blame immigrants, blame workers, blame anyone who doesn’t look or pray or live the day you do.”

“People are waking up,” Ojeda says. “They’re fed up that they’ve been lied to. They’re angry and they damn well should be. Our job now is to meet that anger with something stronger than shame, because mocking people who got conned won’t win anything. The only way to defeat a movement based on fear and division is to build one rooted in courage and care.”

Whether Osborn, Sage, Shrewsbury, Platner, and Ojeda can overcome the many hurdles in their path remains to be seen. None are the kind of “service candidates” — hawkish, corporate-friendly, and only performatively pro-labor — favored by the Democratic Party establishment. And Osborn is once again trying to demonstrate that a labor-backed independent can win without being a Democrat. But each has experienced the kind of personal and political growth, as progressive organizer and political candidates, that should be welcomed and applauded by the Left.