Politicos continue to speculate on which party independent U.S. Senate candidate Greg Orman will caucus with if he wins on Election Day in Kansas. Orman has already said he would be willing to caucus with the majority party, which would help him obtain influential committee positions and put him close to the leadership, but what if neither party has a clear advantage after all the election results are in?Because traditional media outlets only look at elections and American politics through the traditional "red-versus-blue" model, no one seems to be talking about the possibility that three independents in the U.S. Senate could create their own caucus if Sens. Angus King (I-ME), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Orman teamed up.
The creation of an independent caucus would represent a fundamental challenge to the way in which the two parties have captured a constitutional process that gives absolutely no mention to political parties, yet commentators and politicos regularly refer to it as the "Two-Party System."
The truth is, there is no "two-party" system. It is a fiction so deeply embedded in the electoral and political systems in the U.S. that these two private political organizations have assumed control over the organization of both houses in Congress as though the constitution spelled out their presumptive roll.
The fact that Orman is doing so well in a state that is perceived as a solid red state shows not only how the electoral and political landscape is changing in the United States, but how politicos need to re-evaluate the way they look at politics in America.
A growing number of Americans simply refuse to register or affiliate with the Republican and Democratic parties. It is not that people are abandoning the parties; the parties have abandoned them and an independent caucus would strengthen the voice of these voters in Congress.
An Orman victory, followed by a demand to caucus independently, could challenge the fiction created by the two major parties, expose the DC gridlock machine, and lay the groundwork for a history-changing 2016 election cycle.