The independents who want to take over the Senate
The independents who want to take over the Senate
Is the best shot Democrats have at defeating safe-seat Republican senators…not running candidates at all?
That’s the theory behind the party’s approach to several Senate races in deep red territory this year — races in which they hope independent candidates might manage to take down Republican incumbents, if only the Democratic Party would get out of the way.
Key takeaways
- Democrats have cleared the field for independent candidates to have head-to-head matchups against GOP senators in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Idaho.
- These independents have formed a loose alliance and have similar campaign themes; all are campaigning against concentrated corporate power and trying to relatively downplay social issues.
- They’ve floated the idea of a “Fulcrum Caucus,” in which a small group of independents would seize power from the two parties in the Senate.
- But all are being dogged with questions about whether they’re really as independent as they claim, given past ties to or present coziness with the Democratic Party.
In Nebraska, South Dakota, and Idaho, the candidate who won the Democratic primary has since quit the race — often with some “urging” from the party establishment — to pave the way for a two-way matchup between a Republican incumbent and an independent. (Democrats tried to similarly clear the way for an independent in Montana, but the party’s nominee refused to quit the race.)
The theory is that the Democratic brand is so toxic to so many voters in these states that it’s impossible for a Democrat to win there nowadays — but that there’s no great love for the Republican establishment either, and dissatisfaction with the political status quo more generally. So perhaps a fresh-faced independent could capture essentially all of a red state’s Democratic voters and peel away enough Republicans and independents to win.
It’s a bold bet and, most believe, unlikely to succeed — but polls do show surprisingly close races in some of these contests. And it’s not an entirely new strategy. In several red-state Senate contests dating back to 2014, Democrats concluded that the only way to win is not to play, even as all the independents they cleared the way for have lost.
But this year’s crop of independents stands out. For one, they’re running in a national environment that seems much more hostile to the GOP, making it more plausible that one or more makes it to Washington. For another, they’ve formed a loose alliance over group text, and they have something of a shared platform — a focus on economic populism and taking on corporate power, while downplaying cultural issues.
Brian Bengs, the independent running in South Dakota, told me: “I think I can speak for the others when I say our collective efforts are based on the idea that the left-right social issues are what is being used to keep us at each other’s throats. The real fight that we need to have is big money versus little folks — the regular folks.”
They also have some specific plans for how, if elected, they’d get together to shake up how the Senate works.
“If a couple of us, maybe just as few as two independents, get across the line, we can deny a majority to either party. We can create a Fulcrum Caucus,” Todd Achilles, the independent in Idaho, told me. “Both parties would have to negotiate with us to get stuff done.”
Whether these candidates win or lose, their stronger-than-expected candidacies have made Republican incumbents take notice, and are an intriguing model of how to bring at least some competition to states that seem very solidly red — or even, potentially, very solidly blue. Should they perform well in November, their shared message could end up influencing candidates across the partisan spectrum.
Furthermore, if they do reach critical mass in the Senate, it could mean the rise of an informal third party, one that can advance its own agenda in Washington. Yet it should also be noted that the more of them win, the harder the math for a Republican majority specifically gets, since they’d be knocking Republican incumbents — and only Republican incumbents — out of power.
Amidst rising dissatisfaction with both parties, there would seem to be an opening for a different approach. But busting up the two-party system is easier said than done — particularly when all these candidates have past ties or present coziness with Democrats that, their opponents argue, call their supposed independence into question.
The Dan Osborn model
Democrats have tried this strategy of clearing the field for independents in red-state Senate races before — in 2014, when entrepreneur Greg Orman (I) challenged Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS); in 2020, when orthopedic surgeon and commercial fisher Al Gross (I) challenged Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK); and in 2022, when former CIA officer Evan McMullin (I) challenged Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Yet all those independents lost by double digits.
But the current model of an independent challenger was inspired by a different candidate — Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, who came surprisingly close to unseating Sen. Deb Fischer (R) in 2024, and is now challenging the state’s other GOP senator, Pete Ricketts, this cycle.
Osborn has a background as an industrial mechanic, labor leader, and Navy veteran with a plain-spoken affect. He did not graduate from college, he’s said he didn’t own a suit, and he has forearm tattoos. He had led a strike at a Kellogg’s plant in 2021 that won concessions in the company, but he was later fired.
Union figures helped recruit him to challenge Fischer; the consultant Daniel Moraff (who later coaxed Graham Platner to run for office in Maine) also became involved in Osborn’s campaign. Osborn’s admaker Tommy McDonald later co-founded the consulting firm Fight Agency, which is now semi-famous for challenging the Democratic Party establishment by backing Zohran Mamdani and Platner’s campaigns.
Dating back to his initial campaign launch, Osborn’s messaging focused heavily on criticizing “monopolistic corporations,” aligning him with a faction on the left that believes the Democratic Party doesn’t do enough to challenge big money and concentrated corporate power. Osborn also took moderate or conservative stances on some cultural issues, supporting gun rights and President Donald Trump’s border wall. (“If Trump needs help building a wall, well, I’m pretty handy,” he said in one ad.) The Democratic Party stood aside; no Democrats filed to run in the primary.
The result was that in 2024, when Trump won Nebraska by 20 points, Osborn lost his race by just 6.7 percentage points. That closer-than-expected outcome in a disappointing cycle for Democrats made many in the political world take notice, spurring polls and research projects about whether it could be replicated elsewhere — and whether, amidst more favorable national conditions, it could actually succeed.
A squad of independents?
So this cycle, in addition to Osborn himself running again, there are several other candidates trying their luck as independents with similar platforms.
In South Dakota, Brian Bengs, a Navy and Air Force veteran, had previously run for Senate as a Democrat in 2022 and lost in a landslide. Working as a park ranger in 2025, Bengs told me that he became dispirited by DOGE cuts to the National Park Service, and got in touch with Osborn to discuss whether he should run again — this time as an independent against South Dakota’s other GOP senator, Mike Rounds.
“Our economic system and our political system have the same problem, which is too much concentration of money and not enough competition,” Bengs told me. “And it is producing poor results for regular folks in both systems for the same reason.”
The winner of South Dakota’s Democratic primary, Julian Beaudion, quit the race in August, saying he’d faced “intimidating threats to drop out,” setting up a two-way face-off between Bengs and Rounds.
In Idaho, meanwhile, Army veteran, former corporate executive, and former Democratic state legislator Todd Achilles is running as an independent against 83-year-old Sen. Jim Risch.
Before running for office, Achilles had written for the American Economic Liberties Project, the left’s leading anti-monopoly think tank. He told me that “toxic concentrated corporate power,” brought on by “wave after wave of mergers and consolidation,” was destroying free markets in the US, as well as corrupting the political system.
“You can’t tell the difference between a corporatist Republican and a corporatist Democrat anymore,” Achilles said. “They’re both checks from the same organizations, the same special interests.”
In the Idaho race, too, the winner of the Democratic primary dropped out after state party leaders withheld their support.
Finally, in Montana, Seth Bodnar, an army veteran and former president of the University of Montana, is running as an independent for an open seat contest against Republican Kurt Alme. But Democrats’ high hopes that Bodnar could take on Alme untrammeled went awry when the winner of the Democratic primary, Alani Bankhead, refused the entreaties of practically the entire state party establishment to drop out. As a result, polls suggest, Bodnar and Bankhead will split the anti-Republican vote and likely let Alme cruise to victory.
The independents’ big plans for exercising leverage in the Senate
These various independents running have a lot in common — they all have military backgrounds and roughly similar platforms. They’re also all on a group text, per the New York Times — and they’ve started to think about how they could shake up the Senate if they win.
The few independents elected to the Senate in recent decades — centrist Joe Lieberman in Connecticut (after he lost the 2006 Democratic primary), socialist Bernie Sanders in Vermont, and center-left Angus King in Maine — had little in common with each other, but all ended up deciding to caucus with the Democratic Party after they won, believing that’s the best way to score their preferred committee assignments and help advance their priorities.
But Bengs, Achilles, and Bodnar have vowed that they would not do this. They’ve all said they wouldn’t caucus with either party if they win, and that they’d instead caucus with any other independents, making what Achilles calls the “Fulcrum Caucus.”
Achilles told me that, if these independents stick together, they could demand major reforms to the political system such as term limits and age limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, restrictions on dark money spending on elections, and bans on gerrymandering. “I think we’re all aligned on this,” he said. (Several of these ideas would likely be shot down by the current Supreme Court as unconstitutional.)
“The goal is to deny the majority,” Bengs told me. “So neither Team Red or Team Blue gets to impose their will on the other side, without either going through us or working together — which would be a win unto itself, if they would work together.”
With the Senate growing more fiercely partisan in recent years, many have wondered why centrists on both sides don’t get together and try to seize control of the agenda.
Yet the unity of this hypothetical new independent bloc already seems a bit shaky — in part because Osborn hasn’t committed to this strategy. In fact, Osborn has recently begun offering a new answer to the “caucus question” that has dogged him throughout two campaign cycles.
“I’ve given that a lot of thought and completely done a 180 on that,” Osborn told me. “Caucusing with nobody, you wouldn’t get anything done. I’m gonna caucus with everybody.”
That meant, he said, he’d try to caucus with both parties at once. When I asked him whether that was possible and how it would work in practice, he told me, “Nobody really knows, and nobody’s been able to tell me that I can or can’t.”
While Osborn is an underdog, he is generally believed to be the independent candidate with the best shot at winning — several recent polls have shown his race to be tight. Since he has a shot of actually being in the Senate and having to follow through on his promises, he may feel less eager to box himself in.
But are they actually just Democrats?
When I asked the independents why they weren’t Democrats, they offered varying answers. Osborn said that “Biden and Harris failed on our border,” and that “if we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country.” He also said Democrats weren’t fighting hard enough for guardrails on the artificial intelligence industry, and complained that “Chuck Schumer’s daughter just got a job at OpenAI.”
Bengs said “the open borders of Biden” were disastrous, called defunding the police and abolishing the police “stupid ideas,” and said he condemned socialism. Achilles criticized “the dangerous decision to put President Biden forward for a second term” and the “corporatist” lean of the party generally.
But the reality is that prominent Democrats have implicitly or explicitly backed all their candidacies — and some of the candidates themselves were registered Democrats very recently.
Bengs told me he was a registered independent for his entire life, until he wanted to run for Senate in the 2022 cycle, to prevent Sen. John Thune from winning reelection unopposed. When it was too difficult for him to get on the ballot as an independent, he sought the Democratic nomination instead. And when he learned that state law required a party nominee to be a member of that party, he registered as a Democrat. When he lost, he swiftly became an independent again.
“My biggest weakness in this race is the fact that I ran as a Democrat in 2022, and that I was a registered Democrat for 13 months,” Bengs said.
Achilles, for his part, said he was a registered Republican for most of his life — but that, in 2024, state Democrats wanted to appoint him to an open state legislature seat, so he joined the party.
Then, in June 2025, he resigned from the legislature, announced he had switched his party registration to unaffiliated, and launched his Senate campaign against Risch, saying “the two-party system is just fundamentally broken right now.”
“It makes it a lot easier to tag you as a secret Democrat if you’re a former Democratic officeholder or a former Democratic Senate candidate,” Jacob Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, told me.
Osborn’s version of the problem is a series of leaks that have come out in recent weeks, in which he addressed Democrats privately and struck a very different tone than he typically does in public.
The Trump border wall he’d publicly backed was “a symbol of racism,” Osborn privately told a group of Latino and Black Democrats last year. “It’s a joke,” he added. “It does nothing, you know.”
Another recording, from a private campaign-related event, featured Osborn discussing how “Billy Bob in fucking Red Cloud, Nebraska” waves the Trump flag because he wants to be “on the winning team.” He added: “That’s all they care about because their lives probably suck.” (Osborn apologized for those comments after they were leaked, and said: “My life sucks too.”)
“When you’re funded by Democrats, hold the same policies as Democrats, and let your campaigns be run by Democrat consultants with ties to Chuck Schumer and Zohran Mamdani, you’re a Democrat,” Bernadette Breslin, press secretary for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told me in a statement.
That’s the message that Republicans will be broadcasting to voters in these red states. Whether it will work will depend on each particular state and matchup. In Montana, Bodnar has the additional problem of the Democratic candidate staying in the race to split the vote.
But Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, argued to me that Bengs and Achilles have the toughest road — in 2024 Trump won their states, South Dakota and Idaho, by the overwhelming margins of 30 and 36 points, respectively. “It is just hard to find the votes in those states,” he said. But he pointed out that Rounds is up on the airwaves in South Dakota, and said Risch appears to be “taking the race seriously” and “running a real campaign” — so, at the very least, these runs mean the incumbents won’t take another term totally for granted.
Osborn, in contrast, has “the proof point” of coming within 7 points of winning in 2024, Rubashkin said, and this is now a more unfavorable national environment for the GOP. The question is whether his own behavior and comments will have damaged his prior reputation for independence, particularly once they’re amplified by millions in spending from his opponent Pete Ricketts, the self-funding scion of a billionaire family, and the super PAC backing Ricketts.
Still, if Osborn pulls it off, it will be seismic — as the candidate himself mused on one leaked recording.
“If I beat Pete Ricketts, if a shop floor mechanic — independent mechanic — beats an entrenched Republican billionaire in a state like Nebraska, I will be one of the most popular politicians overnight, right?” he said. “And people are going to want to listen to what I have to say.”
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