Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic who ran as an independent Senate candidate in Nebraska, came up short in his quest to unseat Senator Deb Fischer, a low-profile Republican whose closer-than-expected victory in a red state clinched Senate control for her party on election night.

But Mr. Osborn’s 47 percent of the vote in Nebraska well outpaced Vice President Kamala Harris’s 39 percent, and in what he called his “almost success,” there might be clues to how a more populist approach could wrest the working class from Republicans, not through partisan warfare but class consciousness.

“Who’s the one doing the dividing here?” Mr. Osborn asked in an interview on Monday. “I think it’s the people who are laughing all the way to the bank while us common folk live paycheck to paycheck.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Osborn, 49, will return to work as a union steamfitter in Omaha, facing a pile of bills from his time off campaigning, including a $4,000 veterinarian’s bill for the Addison’s disease his dog developed during the election year. He is also announcing a new super PAC, the Working Class Heroes Fund, to try to recruit more blue-collar workers to run for office, and to organize the working class to vote in their economic self-interest.

“I just think it means everything that working people have a seat at the table because we have enough, you know, high-profile lawyers and business execs,” Mr. Osborn said. “I’m not saying they shouldn’t have a seat at the table. Of course they should for what they’ve accomplished in their lives. But I feel like what I’ve accomplished as a working person, although it’s not as glittery and glorious as a C.E.O. starting a company, I’ve certainly given my family a good life.”

Before Mr. Osborn announced his campaign late last year, his only leadership role had been leading his union on strike at an Omaha Kellogg’s cereal plant in 2021. With little money and almost no name recognition, the mechanic crisscrossed Nebraska, leaning on union workers far from the Democratic pockets of Omaha and Lincoln while rejecting the endorsement of the Nebraska Democratic Party.

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