BEATRICE, Neb. – In the back room of a southeast Nebraska brewery, more than three dozen people crowded this summer to hear from Dan Osborn, a former grain factory worker and independent candidate for the U.S. Senate .

The crowd in the small town of Beatrice was larger than Osborn expected, but it stood out for more than its size. Those in attendance ranged from supporters of former President Donald Trump wearing “Make America Great Again” hats to voters who strongly support Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats.

Osborn’s message to everyone was that America’s two-party system has failed them.

“There’s nobody like me in the United States Senate,” he told the crowd. “Right now, the Senate is a club of millionaires working for billionaires.”

Osborn has built a campaign in deeply conservative Nebraska that rejects both major political parties as part of a broken system. For a guy who held his first campaign news conferences from the garage of his suburban Omaha home, he surprised pundits by emerging as a serious contender for the two-term Republican. Senator Deb Fischer in what had been considered a safe Republican seat just a few months ago.

The contest drew $21 million in spending from outside groups, favoring Osborn, and Fischer’s campaign admits the race is closer than expected. There is no Democratic candidate running, but a win for Osborn could disrupt Republican plans to reclaim their Senate majority. Osborn said he would not attend any parties.

That hasn’t stopped Democrats from openly supporting him. In the first 16 days of October, as national attention on him intensified, Osborn raised more than $3 million, almost all of it from individuals and most of it through the fundraising website Democrats’ Act Blue , the Federal Election Commission reports show. That was nearly six times the $530,000 Fischer raised.

Osborn has raised nearly $8 million in total to Fischer’s $6.5 million, and with a little less than three weeks before the election, he had $1.1 million in cash, more than twice more than Fischer had.

Osborn has succeeded not only by rejecting political parties but by campaigning across the state, backed by clever ads — in one he notes, “I don’t even have a suit” — that contrast his working-class roots. with a system where he says politicians “are bought and sold”.

Osborn is a Nebraska Army and Navy National Guard veteran and industrial mechanic who gained national recognition three years ago when he led a strike at Kellogg’s cereal factoriesearning higher wages and other benefits. That background shapes his view that working families are affected by a widening wealth gap, he says.

An Osborn victory would be a huge upset in a state where Republicans hold every statewide office and every congressional district.

Fischer is a farmer from Valentine, a town of 2,600 in northern Nebraska, about 300 miles (483 kilometers) northwest of Omaha. He was a little-known state legislator when he ran like a stranger in 2012, winning a competitive primary and then defeating former Democratic governor and U.S. senator Bob Kerrey. Her campaign ads that year showed her leaning against fence posts and called her “sharp as barbed wire, tougher than a cedar fence post.”

“Nebraskas support me because I’ve delivered,” Fischer said this week, citing national defense and highway projects as areas where his state has done well. “I have a long, conservative record that helped build Nebraska and keep America strong.”

Fischer pollster John Rogers of Torchlight Strategies, a longtime Republican operative, recently argued that the race’s apparent closeness is a “mirage.” Her campaign expects that Osborn will not be able to build a large enough margin in the Democratic areas of Omaha, the state’s largest city, to overcome the votes that Fischer will win in the vast rural areas.

The poll also predicted that Trump’s endorsement of Fischer in September would pull Nebraska voters back into her corner, a state she is expected to win easily. “SHE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!” Trump posted on his social media site Truth.

Trump has labeled Osborn a “radical leftist” and likened him to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is running as an independent but caucuses with Democrats and has become a primary spokesman for liberals. Fischer and her supporters reinforce this message.

Still, Osborn has drawn national attention, complicated Republican ambitions and supported calls to dismantle the nation’s two-party system. This has broad appeal in an age where distaste for politics continues to grow.

“At least as an independent, you’re an open book,” said Jim Jonas, who ran Greg Orman’s high-profile independent U.S. Senate campaign in neighboring Kansas a decade ago. “You have the opportunity to frame yourself, frame the race and run as a refreshing, different choice rather than the two broken parts.”

That’s exactly how Osborn presents himself.

“Congress is a complete misrepresentation of our voter demographics,” he told the crowd in Beatrice. “Less than 2 percent of our elected officials in both the House and the Senate come from working class people.”

Osborn has received donations from political action committees that support independents, such as Wyoming’s Way Back PAC, along with groups that support Democratic candidates.

Its independence has not prevented immigration from becoming a key issue, as it has across the country. Osborn said the U.S. border with Mexico is too porous. But he also says he favors some form of amnesty for long-term illegal immigrants in the U.S. if they work and haven’t committed violent crimes.

As Orman did in 2014, Osborn supports abortion rights. That could help him in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. Voters in seven states, including some conservative ones, have either protected abortion rights or defeated attempts to restrict them in statewide ballots over the past two years. Fischer argued that Osborn would not support any restrictions.

But the core of Osborn’s appeal to his supporters seems to be an all-around working-class man.

He receives support from at least a dozen unions. Two weeks before the election, the AFL-CIO brought high-ranking officials to Omaha to conduct a phone bank in support of Osborn. About 30 union members and officials, including AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, worked the phones to secure support and donations for Osborn.

“His message of supporting working families really resonates with people,” Shuler said.

As he spoke, nearby phone bank volunteers called in donations of up to $3,000 and new pledges of support from the Nebraskans they were calling.

“People now are so cynical about politics,” Shuler said. “And he gets close to these people because he’s one of them.”

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Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas.