Matt Shinners
Independent voters now represent the largest share of the American electorate, and yet they remain mostly unrepresented in federal office. Both major parties have spent decades optimizing for their bases, almost always leaving the near majority of Americans who identify as independent with the choice of either voting for a party candidate they don't fully support or staying home.
A handful of high-profile independent candidates for the US Senate are trying to change that. 2026 is seeing one of the largest surges of interest in independent candidates in recent memory. However, these candidates are often covered as fringe candidates, and stories about them focus more on how they'll impact the outcome of the election between a Republican and Democrat than they do on the substance of the candidate's campaign.
This series exists because the independent electorate deserves better than that. Over the coming months, IVN is conducting in-depth interviews with independent Senate candidates across the country—not just horse-race conversations about polling and fundraising, but substantive discussions about the issues independent voters actually care about.
In Colorado, that candidate is Bob Chew, running on the Forward Party line.
I. The Candidate
Bob Chew grew up in a middle-class family in Cleveland, Ohio, and paid his own way through a chemical engineering degree at Case Western Reserve University. He served as an officer aboard a nuclear submarine in the Navy before co-founding a company to provide technical, operational, and project management consulting.
That company grew from four employees to roughly 750, with operations across North America, Europe, and Asia, and now has $150 million in annual revenue. In 2022, he stepped down as CEO, transitioning the company toward employee ownership.
Chew was a registered Republican as recently as last August. He launched his Senate campaign in March 2026 on the Forward Party line, one of five candidates nominated at the Colorado Forward Party's assembly.
II. The Race
Chew is running for the seat held by Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper, the former Denver mayor and Colorado governor seeking a second term.
Hickenlooper qualified for the ballot by collecting petition signatures, bypassing the state party assembly process. Meanwhile, primary challenger state Sen. Julie Gonzales (a progressive running against what she calls "do-nothing" Democrats) won nearly 75% of delegate support at the Democratic assembly, putting her directly onto the primary ballot.
The Republican nominee, state Sen. Mark Baisley, ran unopposed in his party's assembly and won’t face a challenger in the June 30th primary.
On the fundraising front, Hickenlooper has raised nearly $9 million, with $4 million in cash on hand as of the most recent FEC filing on March 31. Gonzales has raised in the mid six figures, spending down to about $114,000 by the end of Q1; Baisley reported just $32,000 through Q1, with $6,100 cash on hand. Chew is self-funding the early stages of his campaign, having already put in $150,000 to launch, with plans to put in up to $2 million total.
For context, Sen. Hickenlooper spent over $40 million to win this seat in 2020 from incumbent Republican Cory Gardner, in what became one of the ten most expensive Senate races in the country that cycle. Colorado has trended more blue over the past 6 years, and this race is seen by most political handicappers as solidly Democratic.
On voter registration: Colorado has nearly 4 million registered voters, with nearly 53% of them not registered with either party (~2.1 million). Democrats maintain a minor advantage over Republicans, with 993,000 to 898,000 registered voters, respectively.
Hickenlooper's favorability has slipped heading into this cycle. A March 2026 bipartisan poll from the Colorado Polling Institute found him at 43% favorable and 43% unfavorable, a five-point net erosion from the prior year driven largely by Democratic and unaffiliated voters.
Shawn Griffiths
Among likely Democratic primary voters, a more recent survey found him leading Gonzales 38-30, but with just 19% describing themselves as very favorable toward the incumbent. Notably, 25% of voters are still undecided, and Gonzales’ name recognition is under 50% of likely primary voters, giving her a clear path to the Democratic nomination.
III. Why Run Outside Both Parties
Chew's entry into this race starts with a diagnosis. The federal government runs a deficit of roughly $1.8 trillion annually (spending over $7 trillion; raising $5 trillion) and neither party will address it seriously, because the first one to do so hands the other a political weapon.
"I knew that neither major party is going to talk seriously about our debt, how to bring down the deficit spending, social security insolvency, because the first party that does, the other party is going to skewer them, right? Put them on a pike, like the Vikings did," Chew said.
Both parties have built their electoral strategy around fear of the other side rather than affirmative arguments for governance. "You got the two parties that are all doing nothing but fear of the other. If the other party gets elected, it will be the end of civilization as we know it. That's basically the narrative."
That combination—issues neither party will touch and a two-party dynamic optimized for fear rather than governing—is what led him to the Forward Party*. His decision to run as the party’s nominee was both principled and practical. When he reviewed the party’s nine core principles, he found them easy to agree with; practically, a Forward Party nomination meant he didn't need to collect ballot petition signatures.
He recognizes running outside of a major party machine makes his candidacy seem like a long-shot. His pitch to voters deterred by the odds? "If voters want to listen and have their voice heard, they can vote for me. And if they want to listen to the fear of somebody being a spoiler, or fear of the other party getting elected, that's their choice. But at least I'm going to give them a choice."
IV. The Economy: His Central Focus, and the Top Issue for Independents
Chew's economic argument is built around the national debt as a looming problem, but also a driver of a lot of the economic woes faced by the average American today.
His focus isn’t new: he voted for Ross Perot in 1992 when Perot's near-singular focus on deficit spending attracted 19% of the popular vote.
"One could say that as a result of that 19% showing up, politicians woke up to that issue. For a while, we had a reduction in deficits, we actually got to zero and a slight surplus for a couple years toward the end of Clinton's time." Chew said.
He sees his candidacy in a similar light: whether or not he wins, a strong vote total on a platform of fiscal responsibility sends a message that the political cost of avoiding the issue is higher than both parties currently believe.
On closing the budget gap, he's dismissive of the idea that cutting waste, fraud, and abuse can close a $1.8 trillion annual shortfall. He instead discusses healthcare spending: the US spends about 19% of GDP on healthcare (the CMS places it around there), roughly double what most other Western countries spend.
He cited Dartmouth research (auth. here and here, for the complex story) that he says estimates that perhaps half of that gap reflects waste, fraud, and inefficient delivery—overbilling, provider fraud concentrated in senior-heavy markets, a system where "[h]ospitals make more profit dispensing medicines than do the companies that make the medicines."
Having run a company with employees across China, Singapore, Ireland, Italy, the UK, and Canada, he's seen employees in every one of those markets demand private coverage even within government-run systems. He says he could support basic Medicare for All “where you don’t end up with a $100,000 hospital bill hanging over your head” for a decade, but he also believes that “people have to be willing to pay for it.”
He connects fiscal discipline directly to housing affordability: the national debt drives long-term bond rates, which drive mortgage rates. A credible, durable debt reduction plan would produce an immediate market response—lower bond rates, lower mortgage rates, lower effective cost of homeownership—without requiring targeted housing legislation.
The ESOP decision at his company belongs in his nuanced frame of approaching the economy. He doesn't oversell it: "There are situations where an ESOP works very well, and then as industries change, the need for capital changes, and a 100% ESOP isn't always great at providing capital to grow, to acquire."
But it reflects his view of what healthy capitalism looks like: ownership and incentives aligned with workers, the private sector creating jobs, government ensuring stability and a level playing field.
"Businesses, the private sector, is what creates jobs, not government. Government has to assure a level playing field, fairness, no cheating. But if they try to create jobs, they do it pretty poorly, as the Soviet Union showed."
Asked what two things would make his Senate tenure worthwhile, he didn't hesitate to reiterate this economic focus: putting Social Security on a sustainable path and establishing a credible plan to bring down the national debt, paired with concrete steps to reduce total healthcare spending.
"Will I be able to say I restored the American dream? No. Will I be able to say that I contributed to making it more achievable? Yes," he said.
This type of balanced speech permeates the candidate’s discussion of his campaign. He’s aware of the economic difficulties facing many Americans. As a small business owner, he’s been able to help some individuals achieve the American dream.
He sees the government as having one role in promoting economic prosperity, and he would see his role as a senator in having a part to play in spreading the American dream to more people.
V. The Practical Theory of the Race
Chew's view of how an independent with fewer resources (money, party infrastructure) becomes competitive is mechanical: money generates name recognition, name recognition generates poll results, and poll results attract more money.
His $2 million in self-funded seed money is meant to start that cycle, but he was clear that attracting outside money depends on demonstrating traction first. "To attract more money, you've got to show traction in order for people to believe in an independent."
While he lacks the established campaign infrastructure of a major party candidate, his campaign team has real experience. A media firm that has worked for Nikki Haley and Bill Cassidy, a consultant whose career goes back to John McCain, and a Colorado-specific political operative are helping to ensure that his campaign is run professionally.
His coalition targets are the 52% of unaffiliated voters, moderate Republicans "fed up with the current state of the Republican Party," and, to a lesser degree, moderate Democrats willing to look past a party label in a race where Republicans are seen as having a long-shot chance, at best, in a year where Democrats are ahead on the generic ballot.
His best receptions on the trail have come from people with no particular political engagement, such as hotel clerks reacting with genuine surprise that an independent candidate exists at all, which he reads as evidence that unaffiliated voters are an underserved audience.
His theory of how the race gets interesting comes from polling ahead of the Republican and turning it into an effectively two-person contest against Hickenlooper. With several Senate seats that were viewed as safely Republican shifting toward the Democrats, it’s possible the national Republican infrastructure decides that Colorado isn’t worth the investment.
In that world, Chew’s self-funding might be enough to get him in this position, especially if national interest in the independent Senate candidates (driven largely by Osborn’s run in Nebraska) increases name recognition for the other candidates on this unofficial slate.
VI. Building the Fulcrum: A List Taking Shape
Every independent Senate candidate interviewed for this series so far has discussed some conversations they’ve had with the other independent Senate candidates around what they could accomplish as a fulcrum, denying both sides an automatic majority in the upper chamber. (For a fuller account of how the other candidates in the group describe this strategy, see our interviews with Todd Achilles and Ty Pinkins.)
The group has been working toward a joint list of non-negotiables; what they would demand before helping either party organize a Senate majority. When asked for his non-negotiables, Chew brought up several procedural considerations.
The first item he endorsed is that the Senate actually pass budgets through regular order: "That's job number one for the legislative branch, is to pass budgets, and they don't do it."
His own addition targets the reconciliation process, which he wants narrowed back to its original purpose: resolving small discrepancies between House and Senate versions of the same bill, rather than serving as a routine vehicle to bypass the 60-vote filibuster.
His second addition targets the confirmation process. He references changes to the judicial nomination process, starting with Democrat Harry Reid’s 2013 move to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for federal judicial nominations; Republicans later extended that to Supreme Court nominations.
Chew wants to restore the 60-vote threshold for all judicial and Cabinet confirmations, pointing to the historical norm of 90-plus votes for secretaries of defense as evidence of what bipartisan vetting once produced.
Chew noted that the group will be releasing a joint list sometime over the summer. When it drops, it will be the most concrete jointly-authored statement yet of what a coordinated independent bloc would demand in exchange for helping either party organize the chamber.
VII. Assessment
Chew is running a long shot in a deep-blue state against a well-funded incumbent (though there is a path to an upset in the June 30 Democratic primary), on a party line with no federal electoral track record. He doesn't argue otherwise.
What he argues is that his self-funded campaign, run by people with real campaign experience, can generate enough traction to make people believe his run is viable, leading to increased fundraising, leading to more visibility, leading to better polling, in a virtuous cycle. If he can ride the $2 million he’s putting into the campaign to besting the Republican in some polls, he can turn the race into a two-person race against the Democrat.
Short of that, even if he doesn’t win, he thinks his campaign can force the fiscal conversation he's after, and that a strong vote total, even short of a win, sends the same kind of message Ross Perot sent in 1992: that the political cost of avoiding the debt is much higher than the damage that would come from attack ads from opponents.
What distinguishes him within this series is the pairing of private-sector specificity with procedural seriousness. He has spent decades running a global company, and he brings an engineer's impatience with solutions that don't scale. His non-negotiables on the Fulcrum Caucus platform—on reconciliation and the 60-vote confirmation threshold—reflect a candidate who has thought carefully about how the Senate's own rules have contributed to the problems we are currently facing.
The candidate himself notes that neither party touches issues of the debt, healthcare, and Social Security’s solvency because of the lines of attack they will face.
The big question is whether Coloradans are ready to have a conversation that’s going to require tough decisions and nuance in a political climate that’s increasingly tense, and in an election cycle where many believe the stakes are uniquely high. Will those attacks he notes would be flung between the parties, when aimed at him, prevent his campaign from taking off?
But with a nationwide slate of independent candidates, $2 million ready to be deployed, and campaign staff with real experience, Chew’s in a better position than many to force a conversation he believes is necessary.
Both Perot and the Tea Party movement showed that a conversation around the deficit and debt can lead to support that major party leadership didn’t know was out there. In a state where the majority are independents, focusing on an issue others avoid might be enough to break through the noise.
This interview was conducted June 12, 2026.
*The Author of this piece was a senior member of the Forward Party, though he was never involved in any conversations about Bob Chew.