OMAHA, NEBRASKA – The day I talked to Dan Osborn last month, he had just quit his job. He had been working as a steamfitter at Grunwald Mechanical, an HVAC contractor in Omaha, while also running his second campaign for U.S. Senate as an independent. The first one, two years ago against Republican Sen. Deb Fischer, nearly succeeded, with Osborn performing 14 points better against his Republican opponent than Kamala Harris did in Nebraska against hers. But a nonpolitician has to eat, so Osborn went back to work, even while signing up for a second campaign against Nebraska’s other senator, former Gov. Pete Ricketts.

The demands of the campaign trail got to be too much for a full-time job, and Osborn knows choosing it over a steady paycheck is a risky move. “There is a real possibility at the end of this that I lose my house,” he told me on the sidelines of a labor conference in Omaha. “This is why … less than 2 percent of people in the House and Senate come from the working class.”

Democrats throughout the country are talking about the affordability crisis, but independent candidate Osborn is living it. He walks through the beef aisle and has to pass up expensive cuts of meat. He has to worry about affording medical treatment if he or his family has a health emergency. He knows that his kids are growing up in a country where the average age of a first-time homebuyer is 40.

I asked Osborn what he’s hearing from voters today that’s different from his first run. “The sense that I get is that they’ve lost complete faith in government as a whole,” he said. “Especially the young generation. They have a sense of nihilism right now that I don’t know that we’ve ever had in this country for that age group … They’re like, ‘Why should I care about anything?’”