IVN Editorial BoardWhen POLITICO dropped a sexual-assault allegation on Graham Platner this week, Maine’s Democratic establishment didn’t rush to defend its own primary front-runner. It went looking for the exit.
We called it. Before the national press connected the dots, IVN’s Cara McCormick laid out exactly how Graham Platner is about to be “Joe Bidened” — pushed aside not by the voters who backed him, but by party insiders working a quiet provision of Maine election law that lets them hand-pick a replacement if he’s gone by July 13.
Sound familiar? It’s the same machinery that retired Joe Biden from the 2024 ticket without a single primary vote being recast. Prediction markets are already pricing in a Platner exit.
This is the part the two-party story never tells you: the same insiders who lecture the rest of us about “protecting democracy” keep a trapdoor under every primary winner they decide they can’t afford.
It's the same reason why Mike Madrid said Latino voters backed Trump ... and Mamdani on the latest episode of the Independent Voter Podcast.
And it's the same partisan incentives we cover everyday on IVN. This week, Open Primaries president John Opdycke went on Meet the Press to explain why America’s primary system is feeding both MAGA and the Democratic Socialists — and why nearly half the country never gets a real say.
Check out more stories that go outside the two-sided narrative below.
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America’s Primary System Is Feeding Both MAGA and the Democratic Socialists
IVN’s Shawn Griffiths breaks down why closed primaries reward the loudest 4% on each side — fueling the MAGA right and the DSA left alike — while nearly half the country watches from the sidelines, and what the nonpartisan fix actually looks like.
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Independent Voter Podcast
Political strategist and author Mike Madrid joins the Independent Voter Podcast to unpack why so many Latino voters swung to Trump — and then to Zohran Mamdani. His answer is the one neither party wants to hear: these aren’t ideological voters, they’re anti-establishment ones the two-party system keeps misreading.
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10 Organizations Independent Voters Need to Watch
From ballot access and open primaries to independent candidates and ranked choice voting, these are the groups quietly building the next phase of the voter-first movement. The list runs from Open Primaries and the Independent Voter Project working to crack open closed primaries, to the Forward Party building an alternative to the two-party system, to American Promise’s fight for a campaign-finance amendment and Unite NY’s ranked-choice push — 10 organizations every independent should have on their radar.
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Mike Madrid: Neither Party Is Going to Fix a System They Built
Can either party fix a broken political system? Not a chance, argues strategist Mike Madrid — because fixing it was never their job to begin with.
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