May 14, 2026
As the winner of the Democratic US Senate primary in Nebraska mulls dropping out to boost Independent Dan Osborn, another congressional candidate not tied to either major political party launched a campaign for the state’s 1st Congressional District on Thursday.
Joining incumbent GOP Rep. Mike Flood and Democratic primary winner Chris Backemeyer is Austin Ahlman, a 28-year-old investigative journalist, anti-monopolist, and self-described “insurgent Independent running in NE-01 to fight for the little guy.”
Ahlman’s launch video shares some struggles his family has faced—his parents working at the Tyson Foods meatpacking plant in Norfolk that closed in 2006, his dad’s cancer battle, and his mom’s suicide—and his work in journalism, “uncovering corruption among Democrats and Republicans, and taking on the corporations that are destroying our way of life.”
Affordability is how you win.
It’s how Republicans won in 2024, and everything’s gotten worse since. We not only need these DSA’s to win. We need 30 of them to do a tea-party-fication of the Democratic Party. These genocide and war-mongering centrists who’ve spent the last 40 years helping to impoverish us all need a reckoning politically in the worst way.
