SEWARD, Nebraska — Just three days after Graham Platner officially withdrew from the Maine Senate race in the wake of allegations that he’d raped an ex-girlfriend, another candidate 1,500 miles away was quick to set the record straight: He has nothing to do with the men who helped make that dumpster fire of a campaign possible. At least, not anymore.
“They don’t work for me,” said Dan Osborn after a town hall in Seward, Nebraska, a small farming town near Lincoln. The independent Senate candidate, who has the official backing of the Nebraska state Democratic Party, is referring to Morris Katz and Daniel Moraff, two prolific young Democratic consultants who helped recruit both Platner and Osborn, among other nontraditional stars of the left. After Platner’s campaign imploded, a group of 15 Republican female Nebraska state senators had demanded that Osborn fire the campaign boosters.
“Daniel Moraff stopped working for me before all this happened in June,” said Osborn, a former industrial mechanic and labor leader who outperformed Kamala Harris by 14 points in Nebraska during his first run for Senate in 2024, which he lost. “[Moraff] was a minor consultant on the campaign and he just kind of outwore his worth to me. Morris [Katz] hasn’t worked for me since 2024. . . . He made ads for me. There’s a lot of people who make ads. I wouldn’t hire him again.”
Osborn was even more emphatic when he distinguished himself from his former counterpart in Maine. “I don’t share the same values as Graham Platner.”
