Matt Shinners
This Tuesday, on June 2, California voters in the 23rd Congressional District will do something unremarkable: pick two candidates from a crowded primary field to advance to November. But one name on that ballot makes the race worth watching.
Karen Matthews is a Navy radiologist, small business owner, and Loma Linda native—an impressive but standard profile for a candidate for US House. But what is different about her is that she’s running as an independent.
Not as a protest. Not as a spoiler. As a candidate with high-profile endorsements, organizational backing, and a genuine theory of the race. She’s doubled the fundraising of all of the Democrats in the election individually.
If she advances past the Top Two primary, it would be more than a local upset. It would be evidence that something structural has shifted in American politics, and that independent voters are finally in a place to concentrate their political power between candidates that run outside of the two-party system.
It’ll also say something important about California’s Top Two Nonpartisan Primary system as it faces an onslaught of criticism and attacks.
The System Built for This Moment
California adopted its Top Two primary in 2010 after years of complaints that closed partisan primaries handed nominations to ideological activists and left the state's growing bloc of unaffiliated voters (now up to about 27%) on the sidelines.
Under the nonpartisan rules, all candidates share a single ballot regardless of party, and the top two finishers advance to November. Yes, this system can and has resulted in two candidates from the same party facing off in the general election.
Supporters said it would moderate candidates and amplify the voices of independent voters. Critics called it a "jungle primary" and predicted chaos. Both were partially right.
The system did make general elections less predictable…for the parties. But it gave independents in the state the right to vote for candidates before the general election in November.
And it prevented party membership rolls from being inflated by those who stayed members just to be able to vote in the primaries.
Critics say the system has failed independent and third-party candidates. They may appear on the ballot, but almost never make the Top Two in statewide, legislative, and congressional elections.
But is that a structural issue, or does it reflect the will of the voters and an electoral system in the US that was built around two parties?
Top Two is structurally neutral, putting every candidate on the same ballot and letting voters sort it out. What it doesn't do is conjure the donor networks, voter databases, field operations, and institutional endorsements that major-party candidates receive automatically when running on the party line.
Independents appeared in the jungle without preparation. Naturally, they didn’t survive.
And while critics are correct that minor parties and independents haven’t won a federal race under Top Two, they’re wrong about the cause. The mechanism of this shutout wasn't the ballot rules. It was the resource gap.
A District Built for a Third Option
CA-23, freshly redrawn following California voters' passage of Proposition 50 last fall, is represented by Jay Obernolte, who is running to keep his seat. He currently leads in fundraising, outpacing Matthews, in second, by over $1 million.
The district itself skews Republican, with a Cook Political Rating of R+9, and a registration advantage for the GOP (165k, vs 138k for the Democrats). However, it also features a large No Party Preference contingent, making up about 92k residents.
With Matthews on the ballot and leading the Democrats in fundraising, it’ll be interesting to see how the Democratic voters decide to cast their ballot on Tuesday. Even if only a percentage decide to see if an independent can unseat the incumbent, with four Democrats raising at least $10k, the vote could be split enough to allow for those 92,000 NPP voters to see a candidate representing their existence outside of the two major parties on the November ballot.
Who Matthews Is, And Why It Matters
Matthews has spent much of her life in Loma Linda, which sits in the district she hopes to represent. She grew up in the area and graduated from Loma Linda University School of Medicine before serving more than 20 years in the United States Navy as a radiologist, leading medical teams across deployments.
After her service, she built a small business helping veterans navigate the benefits system, seeing firsthand the ways that federal bureaucracy could fail to serve those who had sacrificed most for this country.
She didn't plan to run for Congress. She decided to, her campaign says, because she was done watching Washington fail to listen to Americans.
Her platform focuses on kitchen table issues, reflecting experience with the issues facing most Americans these days. Lowering costs for working families. Expanding healthcare access. Strengthening veterans services. Demanding government accountability.
Her endorsers include former Republican California State Senator William Emmerson, Andrew Yang and Gov. Christine Todd Whitman’s Forward Party*, and Independent Candidates Action.
Those last two endorsements matter more than it might appear. Unlike most independents who have, over the past few cycles, been “on an island” and have needed to build infrastructure from scratch, there’s a growing set of organizations that are establishing this infrastructure in a persistent manner.
The Infrastructure Gap, and How It’s Closing
Outside of those who left their party (and usually, soon after, their seat), it has been more than 35 years since an independent candidate was elected to the US House (Bernie Sanders in ‘90) despite record numbers of Americans identifying as independent.
The gap between voter sentiment and electoral outcomes isn't a mystery. Independent candidates have historically lacked what parties build over decades: voter databases, field operations, donor pipelines, and the institutional credibility that comes from being taken seriously by other institutions.
An independent candidate showing up to a primary has, historically, been like a pickup team walking into an NBA arena.
That is changing—slowly—and through several distinct channels that are beginning to converge.
The most direct investment is coming from organizations built specifically for this moment. The Independent Center is using AI to identify congressional districts where independent candidates could succeed, with the goal of electing enough independents to disrupt two-party dominance on Capitol Hill.
Independent Candidates Action, which has endorsed Matthews, supports a portfolio of candidates across multiple states, analyzing top-two primary environments as favorable terrain for consolidating crossover votes.
Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman’s Forward Party, which has also endorsed Matthews, has spent several years building donor networks and candidate pipelines at the state and local level.
United Independents' "Our House '26" campaign is building the infrastructure, coalitions, and digital tools to elect a bloc of independent candidates to Congress, identifying dozens of districts deemed winnable based on data rather than wishful thinking.
Running alongside those endorsing and strategy organizations is a newer class of campaign tools built from the ground up for candidates without party backing.
GoodParty.org provides voter data, AI-powered canvassing scripts, text-banking, door-knocking maps, and automated campaign planning based on a candidate's specific district and timeline.
The platform requires candidates to pledge to maintain their independence and not plug into the two-party system. The platform claims more than 13,000 independent candidates have won elections using its tools.
The 2024 presidential race added another layer. RFK Jr.'s independent campaign spent $10 to $15 million solely navigating state-by-state ballot access fights—generating legal templates, signature-gathering playbooks, and tactical knowledge that now exists as institutional memory within the independent movement, and within a new class of political consultants who can lend that expertise to new campaigns.
Perhaps the most structurally significant development is what happened to the ballot lines No Labels left behind.
In Arizona, reformers repurposed the infrastructure: the practical difference was stark, with independent statewide candidates facing a signature threshold of over 42,000 to qualify for the ballot while No Labels party candidates needed just 1,288.
The result is a live independent gubernatorial race in 2026, with healthcare executive Hugh Lytle on the ballot against Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs and, likely, Rep. Andy Biggs (the Republican primary is on July 21).
In California, ballot access isn't the same structural bottleneck. But each of these efforts highlights the growing interest, resources, and infrastructure available to those who decide to run outside of the two-party system.
Matthews, plugged into several of these converging networks at once, is the test case for whether that gap has finally closed enough to matter.
What the 'Jungle' Was Always Waiting For
The critique of California's Top Two primary is, at this point, bipartisan, with both sides attacking the system in a new repeal effort tied to fearmongering around the 2026 gubernatorial race.
Shawn Griffiths
What almost nobody asks is whether the system itself was ever really the constraint, or whether the constraint was the candidates themselves, arriving without the infrastructure or experience to compete.
The evidence suggests the latter. No Party Preference voters have been growing for years (doubling in number since the passage of Top Two). The appetite for something outside the two-party binary has been measurable for a generation.
What was missing was the organizational scaffolding to channel that appetite into votes.
If Karen Matthews advances on June 2, it won't be because the voting system finally cooperated. It will be because, for perhaps the first time in a California congressional primary, an independent candidate arrived with the same basic toolkit that party candidates take for granted: endorsements, institutional support, a coherent coalition, campaign tools and expertise, and a district that was already waiting for someone to show up and ask for its vote.
The Top Two primary didn't fail independents. Independents didn't have the infrastructure the jungle required. In CA-23, in 2026, that might finally be changing.
*The author of this piece served in a leadership role at Forward Party, though he was involved in no conversations about the endorsement of Karen Matthews’ campaign.