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 South Dakota, that candidate is Brian Bengs.
I. The Candidate
Brian Bengs grew up in South Dakota, attended Northern State University, and spent the better part of his adult life as a military officer, serving as a JAG attorney—a military prosecutor and federal ethics advisor—before retiring and returning to the state.
He taught law and society to undergraduates at Northern State, a class he describes with genuine affection:
"I got to pick hot button topics—abortion, affirmative action—and enforce the rules of, we're going to have a civil discussion about this. You can say whatever you think as long as you're doing it in a respectful manner, and I'm going to dissect your argument."
He has a law degree and a deep, working familiarity with constitutional history that surfaces constantly in his policy thinking—he's the kind of candidate who answers a question about money in politics by tracing the constitutional amendment process back to 1787 and building a novel legal argument from there.
A lifelong independent, he decided to run as a Democrat for Senate in 2022 against John Thune, who now serves as the Senate Majority Leader, losing by 27 points. He's running again in 2026, this time as an independent, against incumbent Republican Senator Mike Rounds.
II. The Race
Bengs is running against two-term Republican Sen. Mike Rounds. Rounds has raised $3.9 million this cycle and carried $2.7 million cash on hand through May 13, per FEC filings. Bengs has raised $666,000 with $58,000 cash on hand. Democrat Julian Beaudion rounds out the field with $210,000 raised and $3,000 cash on hand. South Dakota has approximately 600,000 registered voters, split roughly 51% Republican, 23% Democrat, and 26% independent. The state has been a Republican stronghold in federal races for decades.
In head-to-head polling between Rounds (Republican) and Beaudion (Democrat), the incumbent handily wins 56-31. But a head-to-head between Rounds and Bengs tells a different story: 44-40, a race within the margin of error, and with Bengs’ name recognition lower than the incumbent’s.
The same polling has the three-way general at 43-23-18, with Bengs running 5 points ahead of the Democrat—a gap that is the foundation of his argument that he, not Beaudion, is the viable path for the roughly 29% of South Dakotans who want a change. While it needs to be noted that the poll in question was sponsored by Bengs, no one—including Beaudion—has released a poll with different results.
III. Why Independent: A Lesson Learned at Parades
Bengs describes himself as a lifelong independent, outside of his brief stint as a Democrat to run for Senate in 2022. On that experience, Bengs in unequivocal: "I would never run as a Democrat again. That was my takeaway. The whole experience from the ‘22 race was soul sucking and exhausting."
He describes a scene that repeated itself throughout that campaign: approaching voters at parades and county fairs, including people in Trump hats, introducing himself as a candidate, and telling them he could guarantee they'd agree on at least two, probably three things. He'd run down the list—big money controls politics, healthcare should be affordable, Congress needs term limits—and they'd nod along. "Generally it was all three. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good." Then he'd ask for their vote in November. "And the first words out of their mouth were: So what are you?"
When he said he was running as a Democrat, the conversation ended. "I'll never vote for a Democrat. Sometimes there was an expletive in there. The takeaway was that the letter was more important than what I was saying. The ideas that they agreed with me on did not matter so much as what team are you playing for, what jersey do you have."
IV. The Issues That Unite Everyone
Those three issues—money in politics, healthcare affordability, and term limits—are not accidental choices. Bengs has talked to thousands of South Dakotans across the state and says he has "yet to meet a person who disagrees" with the idea that big money controls politicians.
His campaign website frames the entire race around that premise: that Big Money has corrupted both parties to the point where regular people who play by the rules can no longer afford the lifestyle their parents had, and that the only way to fix it is to send people to Washington who don't owe anything to the system that built the problem.
Term limits poll at 80%+ support nationally and have for 40 years. "There's some low-hanging fruit that the vast majority of people agree with, and yet the two-party system refuses to address." His platform calls for term limits of two terms in the Senate and six in the House, and he has pledged to abide by his own limit regardless of whether it becomes law—a pledge shared by at least one other independent Senate candidate this year.
On healthcare, his platform calls for a five-stage overhaul of the system—extending ACA coverage to 30, enhancing ACA subsidies, lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 55, creating a public option, and paying for it by levying taxes on billionaires and corporations. He notes that the structural pricing problems that make U.S. healthcare cost roughly twice what comparable wealthy countries pay per capita also need to be addressed. Medical debt is already the leading cause of personal bankruptcy; the status quo, he argues, isn't sustainable.
While these three policy areas are central to Bengs’ argument to voters, they’re far from the only policy areas he discusses on his website. Many candidates speak in generalities about their platform, or leave details fuzzy, but Bengs presents long-form articles discussing how he would approach myriad problems. Democrats and Republicans have the benefit of a party platform that allows people to understand how they would approach most policy areas, but independents lack that. Bengs has made sure that, absent a national “independent” platform, voters can understand where he stands on many key issues.
Asked what two things would make his time in the Senate worthwhile: "Getting money out of politics to the maximum extent possible would be the single biggest accomplishment I think of my career and of Congress. And I’d also like to get healthcare affordable, so people don't have to worry about, ‘Don't call the ambulance, because I can't afford that.'"
V. History, Antitrust, and Teddy Roosevelt
Bengs has a historian's instinct for finding the right precedent. He invokes the 1912 election —Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose run, the antitrust era, the moment when a large section of the American public decided that concentrated corporate power had gone too far and something structural had to change.
He points out that South Dakota gave Roosevelt his highest popular vote margin of any state in that race (auth. By percent of the vote). The history is both inspiration and argument: South Dakota has responded to this message before, and the conditions are similar enough to take seriously.
On antitrust specifically, Bengs uses the example of the meatpacking monopoly, a through-line from Roosevelt’s first term in 1902 and a problem Bengs sees today.
The candidate’s argument? When Roosevelt took his first actions against the big six meat-packing companies, those firms controlled about 50% of the industry. Today, four companies control 80-85% of beef packing in the United States, and they've been credibly accused of price fixing within the last decade. "We need to do something about it. We need more competition. That's the same answer that we need in the political system."
His platform calls for aggressive antitrust enforcement on Big Ag, and he’s making this argument directly to ranchers who, he says, are getting squeezed on both ends—by consolidation in inputs and in processing.
He connects corporate consolidation directly to inflation: robust antitrust enforcement, he argues, would go "a fair distance to addressing the cost of things immediately" because the current pricing power of consolidated industries flows straight to consumers' grocery bills and gas receipts.
VI. Money, the Constitution, and a Novel Legal Theory
On campaign finance, Bengs goes beyond the standard "overturn Citizens United" position with a constitutional argument he developed from his international law background that is genuinely unusual in this space. His starting point: the Constitution's amendment process was written when every state legislature had the authority to amend its own state constitution.
Over the past 75 years, every state except Delaware has shifted to requiring a popular vote to change its state constitution. Bengs' argument is that this represents a fundamental change in constitutional facts—that state legislatures have ceded the authority they once had to ratify national constitutional amendments, because that power has passed to the people directly.
If correct, it would mean that a constitutional amendment banning unlimited corporate political spending could be ratified by popular vote in every state except Delaware, bypassing the legislatures that have consistently protected the current system.
He frames it as unconventional but grounded: "I've got this crazy idea—I'll be crazy for a bit."
His fallback, if the legal theory doesn't hold, is a state-by-state strategy, exemplified by the work being done in neighboring Montana to rein in corporate political spending through a change in corporate chartering using the initiative process. South Dakota, Bengs notes, was the first state to adopt the ballot initiative process.
He also supports a mechanism of drowning out billionaire spending through public financing, highlighting a South Dakota precedent: in 2016, voters passed a ballot initiative providing roughly $100 per registered voter as a voucher to allocate to candidates in small increments.
The legislature nullified it before it went into effect.
"There is an appetite for it," he said. "And given the amount of money flowing into politics now, if we allowed $100 per registered voter, you'd end up with roughly the amount of money the billionaires are dumping into our elections right now—but it would actually reflect what voters want."
VII. The Fulcrum and What Bengs Would Demand
Bengs is part of the same coordinated group of independent Senate candidates described in earlier pieces in this series, and he mentioned that the group’s list of their shared platform as to how they’d leverage the fulcrum should be released in the next few weeks. (For more on how other candidates in the group describe the strategy, see our pieces on Todd Achilles, Bob Chew, and Ty Pinkins.)
When discussing the groups’ leverage, Bengs starts with an interesting note: the easiest theoretical option for the two parties would be to cooperate with each other and nullify independent leverage entirely—"but that seems like it does not happen anymore, because of the way the political system is structured."
If, as he expects, that doesn’t happen, Bengs says he'd push for campaign finance reform, and a national prohibition on gerrymandering, as the concessions a major party would need to make for him to support them (not caucus with them, as the group is very clear in stating).
VIII. Assessment
The obstacles are familiar: a 6- or 7-to-1 fundraising deficit against Rounds, a Democrat in the race who complicates the coalition math, and a state where registered Republicans make up a majority of the electorate.
But Bengs brings something to the race that is harder to quantify than fundraising totals: the combination of a JAG officer's methodical precision, a professor's command of the Constitution and our history, and a direct personality that doesn’t shy away from hard questions while refusing to talk down to voters. He’s spending his days traveling throughout the state, campaigning to anyone who will listen.
His practical proposals to restore power to voters, his novel constitutional theory on amendment ratification, his TR-to-today antitrust argument—these aren't talking points, they're the product of someone who has been thinking hard about these problems for a long time and is running as an independent because he believes the parties won’t solve any of the problems that he sees facing this country.
The 13-point platform release in the coming days will be worth watching as the clearest statement yet of what the group of independent candidates is prepared to demand. If it reflects the detail and thought that has gone into Bengs’ policy platform, it should give voters a clear view of what they can vote for in November.
This interview was conducted June 25, 2026.