A Senate independent challenger smeared his Republican opponent’s staff as “Hitler Youth frat boys” in a call with prospective Democratic donors on Friday, amid mounting concerns over heightened political rhetoric that has channeled into violence this election cycle.
Independent candidate Dan Osborn on a Zoom meeting with a NY-based Democratic donor collective accused Nebraska GOP Sen. Deb Fischer of harboring Nazi-level lackeys on her campaign team, according to video footage exclusively obtained by The Post.
“As far as Sen. Fischer’s campaign has gone, she’s never had any competition so her staffers and her campaign team are a bunch of Hitler Youth frat boys, to be quite honest with you,” Osborn told attendees on the call with the New York Buddy Group.
“It’s kind of disconcerting who she surrounds herself with,” he emphasized.
The incendiary remark follows years of repeated comparisons by Democrats and left-wing pundits between the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and former President Donald Trump, who sits at the top of the 2024 ticket.
That rhetoric has drawn even more heightened criticism in the wake of two assassination attempts against Trump in July and September — during one of which he was shot in the right ear.
President Biden called for all political campaigns to “lower the temperature” after the first attempt was made on Trump’s life at a rally in Butler, Pa., but his own campaign had six months earlier placed the former president’s remarks side by side with Hitler’s.
“That was a little harsh, wish I could have that one back,” Osborn told The Post in an emailed quote on Monday. “I served in the Navy and sometimes I still talk like [a] sailor. I’m not a career politician, I talk like a regular guy because I am a regular guy.”
The Navy veteran and grain millers’ union leader has pitched himself as a working-class moderate and attacked Fischer as a Washington insider backed by wealthy corporate donors and the pharmaceutical industry.
He has also taken pains to distance himself from Democrats, with the main campaign arm for Senate races not getting involved in his race and a spokesperson for his campaign telling NOTUS last week that he was working to defeat the “two-party doom loop.”
New state polls show that strategy may be working to build his name recognition and bring him within a percentage point of Fischer in the race.
But the industrial mechanic is collecting much of his cash from well-connected liberal donors, with a super PAC aligned with his candidacy raking in as much as $100,000 from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman as well as the George Soros-backed Sixteen Thirty Fund nonprofit.
His principal campaign committee has also received the maximum $3,300 donation from former pharmaceutical executive Roger Perlmutter of Merck & Co. — and a $5,600 donation from “Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ex-chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, Federal Election Commission filings show.
On Sunday, he is scheduled to host a fundraiser with “Veep” star Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
Osborn in his pitch to donors also pointed to the 2022 failed candidacy of Republican gubernatorial hopeful Charles Herbster, who was backed by Trump, as a bad omen for Fischer.
“I’m not 100% sure that Trump has the sway and swagger here that people want to believe in our red state,” he said of the 45th president, who won Nebraska in 2020 by more than 19 percentage points.
Herbster lost in the primary to another Republican, businessman Jim Pillen, one month after being hit with a slew of sexual assault allegations.
Fischer, who received Trump’s endorsement earlier this month, has represented Nebraska in the Senate since winning her 2012 election by a more than 15-point margin. In 2018, she won by a nearly 20-point margin.
The New York Buddy Group donor collective can help Democratic and Democratic-leaning candidates raise between $30,000 and $50,000 per hour, according to MSNBC, with the average donation per person around $250.
Sarah Kovner, a co-founder of the group, is a longtime supporter of Bill and Hillary Clinton and has contributed almost $900,000 to Democratic candidates since 1982.
Tony Vargas, who is challenging Republican Rep. Don Bacon in Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, was also on the call.
