The “independent” candidate for Senate in deep-red Nebraska who says he rejects “partisans,” Dan Osborn, owes his political rise to a pair of Ivy League-educated socialist operatives who also recruited self-described “communist” Graham Platner and “Squad” member Summer Lee to run for office.
The operatives, Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, are best known for plucking the scandal-plagued Platner from obscurity and coaxing him into running for Senate. But Platner was not the engaged couple’s first go at a Senate seat. The pair told the Wall Street Journal over the weekend that they also recruited Osborn to run against Republican incumbent Deb Fischer in 2024. Osborn, who had no Democratic challenger, ran as a “lifelong Independent” who eschewed both political parties, though he received millions of dollars in support from a super PAC tied to Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.). He lost to Fischer by 6 points and is now running against Nebraska’s junior Republican senator, Pete Ricketts.
Osborn’s association with the socialist operatives is at odds with the image he has worked to cultivate as a Second Amendment-supporting independent in deep-red Nebraska.
The duo told the Journal that they look for candidates who reflect “the culture of the district they come from.”
Osborn’s campaign paid Moraff’s consulting firm, Dark Forest LLC, $9,000 for “strategy consulting” in December, campaign finance disclosures show. Platner’s campaign has paid the firm nearly $75,000 since November.
Neither Moraff nor Osborn immediately responded to requests for comment.
Moraff also orchestrated the rise of the far-left Pittsburgh congresswoman Lee, for whom he served as campaign manager when she ousted an incumbent state representative in the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s 12th district. Moraff eventually let his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America lapse, according to In These Times, but not because of any disillusionment with the ideology. Rather, Moraff said the party’s Pittsburgh chapter became too “internally focused” and has criticized DSA members for operating too “mechanically” with their endorsements.
Lee, a former DSA member, voted against a House resolution expressing support for Israel after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist rampage and suggested in April at a rally for Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed that the “upper class” is the enemy.
Osborn’s connection to Platner and to the Democratic Party’s socialist wing via Moraff and Fan may prove damaging in a state that backed President Donald Trump by more than 20 points in 2024.
Platner has faced blowback in recent weeks for scandals including the Nazi symbol he had tattooed on his chest for nearly 20 years, the sexts he sent “several women” shortly after marrying his wife, and the allegations that he physically harmed an ex-girlfriend. Osborn has not publicly addressed Platner’s candidacy.
Moraff, for his part, worked as a DSA organizer before leading Lee’s campaign. In a deleted 2021 tweet reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, he described himself as a “man who longs for socialist governors.” Moraff also penned a since-deleted 2017 article arguing that socialists must run in Democratic primaries to “build power.”
“Primary campaigns provide real opportunities for leftists to compete and win,” he wrote. “We can adopt a strategy that takes advantage of the low barrier to entry of the Democratic primary, and use those victories to build our own forces—forces that, once strong enough, could plausibly break from the party.”
Moraff, a Yale Law School graduate, and Fan, an academic who coauthored the Harvard Business School case study “The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations,” met while working for Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. At that time, Moraff was an active X poster who regularly used the social media site to attract volunteers for Sanders’s campaign in Massachusetts and to discuss broader political strategy with other left-wing activists.
He became more private over the following years, locking his X account around the time he was Lee’s campaign manager. Moraff has also said little about his experience recruiting and working with Osborn, though his fingerprints are on the beginnings of Osborn’s 2024 campaign. The campaign’s original finance director, Brad Chester, is a DSA member who, like Moraff, worked on Sanders’s 2020 presidential bid. In late 2023, the campaign paid more than $7,000 to Bread and Roses, a DSA-linked consulting firm managed by former staffers for Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.). Osborn said a year later that he “love[s] Bernie” but needed to “peel off some conservatives” to defeat Fischer.
Moraff and Fan have been more willing to discuss their work with Platner. In December, the pair recounted their efforts to recruit a Senate candidate in Maine with Politico, revealing that they only turned to Platner after ironically determining that another prospective candidate, union leader Chris Williams, had “a skeleton in the closet.” They met with Platner’s mother at her fine dining restaurant and then met with Platner himself, deeming him “exceptional.” After huddling with another left-wing operative, Morris Katz, who has advised Osborn and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, Platner launched his Senate bid.
Moraff and Fan told the Wall Street Journal that they were unaware of many of Platner’s scandals before they were reported by the news media, though they had paid a research firm “a whole chunk of money” to vet the candidate.
Graham Platner was recruited to run for Senate by a pair of socialist political operatives, Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, who determined that another prospective candidate had ‘a skeleton in the closet.”
The Wall Street Journal published a rare interview with the duo on Sunday… pic.twitter.com/tbmOE5nxJX
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) June 8, 2026
“Did the vetting process turn up the tattoo that became so controversial?” interviewer Aaron Zitner asked. “No,” Moraff responded. “The Reddit posts, did that turn up in the vetting process?” Zitner followed up. “The firm sent us a thing, and it had some of the posts, but it didn’t have all of them,” Moraff said. “Yeah,” added Fan.
Read the full article here
