Matt Shinners
Independent voters now represent the largest share of the American electorate, and yet they remain almost entirely unrepresented in Congress. Both major parties have spent decades optimizing for their bases, 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 are trying to change that in 2026. They are often covered as fringe candidates whose stories are told through the lens of how they'll impact the outcome between a Republican and a Democrat, rather than on their own terms. This series exists because independent voters deserve better than that.
Michael Bridgford is running for US House in Iowa's 1st Congressional District.
The Candidate
Michael Bridgford is a 41-year-old self-employed financial adviser from Bettendorf who had never run for office before this cycle. He was raised on a seventh-generation family farm outside the Quad Cities in Joy, Illinois; attended public schools; and earned an MBA from Northwestern.
He has told interviewers that his family's experience in the 1980s farm crisis shaped how he thinks about economics, and he has voted for and been registered with both parties over the course of his life.
His campaign launched with four pillars—lowering costs and restoring fiscal sanity; putting Iowa producers first; ending the culture wars; and revitalizing rural health care—alongside an anti-corruption package of term limits, age maximums, and a congressional stock trading ban. This platform has since expanded to include other topic areas.
The Race
Iowa's 1st spans 20 counties in the southeast corner of the state. It is, by margin, the closest House district in the country. Rep. Miller-Meeks (Republican) won it in 2024 by 799 votes after a districtwide recount. That’s two-tenths of a point in a district Trump carried by more than eight, and a significant shift from the ~20,000 votes she beat her Democratic opponent by just 2 years earlier.
Her first win, in 2020, came by just six votes. The Cook Political Report rates it a toss-up.
November will be the third consecutive Miller-Meeks–Bohannan matchup. That repetition is central to Bridgford's pitch. "They've just beaten each other up so much with negative ads now heading into this third election," he said in an interview with IVN.
The registration math is the other half of the argument. As of August, the district had 153,396 active no-party or other party voters, 166,348 Republicans, and 144,161 Democrats, according to the Iowa Secretary of State. No-party beat out the Democrats for the second largest bloc, and, because Iowa runs partisan primaries that require a party declaration, those numbers are likely soft as people register in a party to vote in the primary.
If Bridgford can consolidate that voting bloc behind his campaign, it could lead to an unexpected outcome in November that wouldn’t be seen in the primary vote totals.
The money, as is often the case in races with independents, is not close. IA-1 is at the top of the target list for the Democratic Party, and the money pouring into the race for both major party candidates reflects that. Through June 30, Miller-Meeks has raised roughly $7.21 million, and Bohannan has raised roughly $7.05 million, with about $4.7 million and $5.5 million on hand, respectively.
Bridgford raised roughly $190,000.
While the money discrepancy is stark, Bridgford expects the top of the ticket to help him. Iowa has open races for governor and US Senate—Rob Sand against Zach Lahn, and Josh Turek against Ashley Hinson. He points to Lahn's primary upset of Trump-endorsed Rep. Randy Feenstra as evidence of an independent streak in Iowa's electorate, and argues both gubernatorial nominees "are talking more to independents than they are to partisans."
If that focus increases the vote share of independents in November, that presents an opening for Bridgford.
The Polling
The most recent public survey of the district is the Bullfinch Group poll conducted for the Independent Center, fielded in mid-July across five races featuring independent candidates.
Bridgford says the Bullfinch survey tested a three-way race between him and the two major party candidates. He reports that the survey (which isn’t fully released) put him at 11%, with only 21% of voters having formed an opinion of him and two of three of those viewing him favorably.
According to him, this shows that he isn't behind on preference so much as on recognition, against two candidates on their third campaign. "I've basically been in this 105 or so days," he said. If that 21% number can increase substantially while the 2-to-1 favorability split holds, there is a lot of upside for the independent.
Building Independent Infrastructure That Doesn't Exist
Independent candidates frequently run into an infrastructure problem, where campaign experts and tools aren’t immediately available the way they are for major party candidates. "A lot of vendors we talked to love the campaign, love the message, but just said, you know, we'd be blacklisted if we were to work with you," he reported.
In the tightest seat in the country, no consultant with party clients wants to be the firm that helped the independent.
His campaign instead has relied on personal connections and University of Iowa students, whom he describes as the campaign's operational backbone. He calls it "a snowball that's turned into an avalanche."
That avalanche is starting to grow nationally. We’ve reported on the network being built around the independent Senate candidates, and that’s started to expand to independent House candidates, at least regionally.
But the movement has also seen a lot of national attention over the past month with Sen. Manchin’s announcement of an independent initiative. Bridgford was one of the candidates who convened in West Virginia at the behest of the former Senator for the launch of the Independent Leadership Council, alongside Rep. Kevin Kiley, Seth Bodnar, and Todd Achilles.
Attendees signed the council's Declaration of Independence—a three-part pledge to work towards open primaries, engage in cross-aisle work, and explain their votes to their constituents. He has also taken the Political Integrity Pledge, promising to turn down corporate PAC money and accepting a personal ban on stock trading while in office, as well as working to overturn Citizens United.
His read on what a win would do is infrastructural rather than legislative. "The idea that if just two, three, four people can win this year, you're going to have 25, 30, 50 people run the next election," he said. "And then on the other side of it, also having the infrastructure for it."
The Two-Year Test
What separates Bridgford's policy answers from the movement's usual register is that he refuses to promise things a single House term cannot deliver. His tenor is realistic and practical rather than grandiose and utopian/apocalyptic.
Asked about health care—Medicare for All, a public option, enhanced ACA subsidies—he declined all of it on feasibility grounds. "I'm running here to be elected in 2026, and right now President Trump is president, and he'll likely be the president through 2028," he said. "I just don't see any plausibility to those being put in place in the next two years."
What he'd pursue instead is price transparency: "Health care is one of the only places where you don't know what you're paying. You get home two weeks later, you get a bill, and it's a made-up number."
The same discipline runs through his fiscal answers. He backs a deficit cap at 3% of GDP and a pay-as-you-go rule, but concedes the emergency carve-out immediately—war, pandemic, financial crisis—with a supermajority override.
"The problem is those are the times when we need to be running big deficits," he said. "But we do it then, and then we keep doing it after we get through it, and that's what's unacceptable."
Closing the gap, he says, takes both revenue and cuts, and he named corporate taxation at the high end and Pentagon end-of-year "use it or lose it" spending as places to start. On housing, he mentions the good in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which became law in July without Trump's signature, but argues mortgage rates near 7% won't fall until the fiscal picture improves.
His leverage strategy is scoped the same way. He would not vote for Mike Johnson or Hakeem Jeffries —"if it was 217, 217, and one, and I was the one, I wouldn't be voting for either"—and would trade his speaker vote for single-issue bills instead of omnibus packages, a floor vote on term limits, and a rewrite of how committees are constituted so the majority doesn't hold total control.
The Assessment
Bridgford is running the hardest version of the independent play: no party infrastructure, a fraction of the money, and a three-way race against opponents with high name ID in a district previously decided by 799 votes. Both major parties see their chances at a House majority running through a win in the district.
But the thing worth noticing is what he isn't doing. The independent lane has a persistent temptation toward the grand promise—that breaking the two-party grip will unlock everything at once. Bridgford has declined that framing repeatedly, in an interview where the easier answer was always available.
His answers are incremental, practical, and, maybe most importantly, realistic. For a movement whose credibility problem often stems from making promises about quick and major changes for the better with a single election cycle of wins, while at the same time failing to make any electoral headway, the self-restraint is notable.
The district has seen razor-thin margins, and the independent voter bloc is large and hasn’t had a say in who will appear on the general election ballot. With Rep. Miller-Meeks and Bohannon being that matchup for the third time in a row, many of those voters might decide it’s time to try something new. How many will make that decision will be what to watch out for in November.