Matt Shinners
If you’re looking for independent candidates, it can be hard to find them. They lack the national infrastructure of candidates running as a member of the two major parties. The legacy media won’t cover them because they view them as irrelevant or potential spoilers, thus making it more likely that they fail to gain traction because they’re not receiving equal coverage.
If you want to find these candidates in your area, you have to look elsewhere. Luckily, there are organizations out there who are endorsing independent-minded candidates as well as candidates who support reforms key to unlocking independent political power.
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Below is a list of several of those organizations. They fall into three buckets.
The first bucket is groups explicitly built to identify and endorse independent candidates.
The second is political parties outside the two-party duopoly, signaling their independence in the same way that a band signing to an indie label refuses to be a part of a system they view as detrimental.
The third is reform and advocacy organizations pushing structural changes independents tend to favor—open primaries, ranked-choice voting, ending Citizens United, term limits—whose endorsement lists lean heavily Republican and Democrat, since most of their targets are sitting members of Congress or state legislators who could vote on reform legislation.
These organizations all have different criteria for their endorsements, as well as different policies on when they endorse (e.g., some won’t endorse until after the major party primaries are done).
Independent Groups
These organizations focus specifically on finding, vetting, and endorsing independent and nonpartisan candidates.
Independent Action
- Focus: Political action committee dedicated to electing independent candidates to federal and state office.
- Criteria: Candidates must run and campaign as independents, unaffiliated with either major party.
- Endorsement page: independentaction.org
Independent Veterans of America (IVA)
- Focus: Veteran-led organization mobilizing politically independent veterans as candidates and organizers.
- Criteria: Candidates must be veterans running as independents; IVA's 2026 list spans U.S. House and Senate races in Idaho, Mississippi, Illinois, California, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Montana.
- Endorsement page: independentveteransofamerica.org/candidates
Our House
- Focus: PAC and political movement built around a multi-cycle "Leverage Strategy"— identifying, endorsing, and funding a strategic coalition of independent-minded candidates to build a working independent bloc over time.
- Criteria: Candidates must run as independents or post-partisan reformers (the group's endorsements include "Independent Republican," "Independent Democrat," and straight independent labels) committed to anti-corruption and public accountability; candidates apply directly through the PAC.
- Endorsement page: ourhouseunited.us/home (scroll to bottom)
Independent Center
Note that the Independent Center doesn’t officially endorse candidates, but it does list races where there are independents running viable campaigns. While you won’t see the Independent Center advocate for an independent candidate, you can find independent candidates by looking at the races they’re interested in, warranting their inclusion on this list.
- Focus: National advocacy group tracking and promoting competitive independent candidacies.
- Criteria: Races with registered independents running in races that the Center’s experts believe will be competitive.
- List of races: independentcentervoice.com/election2026
GoodParty.org
- Focus: Organization that builds tools to help independent candidates win their races despite lacking the advanced infrastructure of the two major parties.
- Criteria: Candidates must run and serve as independent, nonpartisan, or third-party (not Democrat or Republican), decline endorsements from either major party, and raise a majority of funds from individuals rather than PACs, lobbies, unions, or corporations. Full criteria: goodparty.org/team
New Parties
New political parties function as their own endorsement engines, nominating and backing candidates the way a party ordinarily would—just from outside the two dominant labels.
Overlap with the "independent groups" category above is real (Forward-aligned candidates, for instance, often run as registered independents), but a party's endorsement can function differently: it might come with a ballot line, a brand, a platform, and, in some cases, institutional infrastructure.
Forward Party*
- Focus: Cross-partisan party backing candidates—Forward candidates, independents, Democrats, and Republicans—who commit to practical problem-solving and structural reform.
- Criteria: Candidates must support some form of election reform aligned with Forward's platform (open primaries, ranked-choice/approval/STAR voting, etc.); the party does not require ideological uniformity or use of its own label, but it does require pledging to uphold key values you can read here.
- Endorsement page: forwardparty.com/candidates
Green Party
- Focus: Left-of-center third party running its own candidates on a platform built around environmental policy, social justice, grassroots democracy, and nonviolence.
- Criteria: Candidates must run under the Green Party ballot line and align with the party's Four Pillars platform.
- Endorsement page: gp.org/2026_candidates
Libertarian Party
- Focus: Third party organized around limited government, individual liberty, and free markets.
- Criteria: Candidates must run under the Libertarian ballot line and generally align with the party's platform on civil liberties and reduced government intervention.
- Endorsement page: lp.org/meet-our-candidates
Alliance Party
- Focus: Centrist party formed from the 2018 merger of a dozen state-level independent and centrist parties (including the Modern Whig Party and the American Party of South Carolina), running candidates on transparency and anti-corruption themes.
- Criteria: Candidates must run under the Alliance Party ballot line or one of its state affiliates (Independent Party of Connecticut, Reform Party of Florida, among others) and commit to the party's core values, including term limits and rejecting "party machine" politics.
- Endorsement page: theallianceparty.com/pages/current-candidates - Note that they haven’t made any endorsements yet for the ‘26 cycle.
Issue and Reform Advocacy Groups
These groups don't organize around the independent/major-party distinction at all—they endorse or certify whoever supports their specific reform, regardless of party. Because most sitting legislators who can act on these reforms are Democrats or Republicans, these lists skew heavily toward major-party officeholders.
They're useful to independent voters less as a roster of independent candidates and more as a scorecard of who—in either party—is actually willing to act on the structural issues independents tend to prioritize. In short, these groups can help independents find major-party candidates supporting reform efforts that empower independents, especially in races where there are no independent options on the ballot.
Fair warning: Currently, members of the Democratic Party are more likely to endorse these reforms, so these lists skew heavily in that direction. Term limit advocacy is the exception, where support is more likely to be seen on the Republican side of the aisle.
End Citizens United
- Focus: Campaign finance reform group aimed at overturning Citizens United and reducing the influence of dark money in elections.
- Criteria: Candidates must commit to campaign finance reform and rejecting corporate PAC money.
- Endorsement page: endcitizensunited.org/endorsements
FairVote—Ranked Choice Voting Endorsers
- Focus: Voting-reform organization tracking elected officials, candidates, and organizations that have endorsed ranked-choice voting.
- Criteria: Public endorsement of RCV as a voting method; the list mixes candidates, sitting officials of both parties, and outside organizations rather than functioning as a traditional candidate slate.
- Endorsement page: fairvote.org/our-reforms/ranked-choice-voting/endorsers
U.S. Term Limits
- Focus: The country's largest term-limits advocacy group, pushing a constitutional amendment capping House members at three terms and senators at two.
- Criteria: Candidates and sitting members of Congress sign a pledge to co-sponsor and vote for the U.S. Term Limits Amendment.
- Endorsement page: termlimits.com/120th-congress-signers
Remember: Endorsements from these three buckets answer different questions.
A group like Our House or GoodParty.org endorsing a candidate says something about that candidate's independent status. A party endorsement says a candidate has institutional backing outside the duopoly, but not necessarily independence from any party structure itself. And a reform group's endorsement says nothing about party at all—only that a candidate, usually Republican or Democrat, has taken a position independents care about.
*The author of this piece was a senior member of the Forward Party team and was involved in the creation of the endorsement process and criteria, and in the establishment of the Forward Party’s value-based pledge.