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.
In California's 6th Congressional District, Rep. Kevin Kiley serves as the only independent currently serving in the House of Representatives, and he’s running for reelection in a district gerrymandered to end that service.
The Candidate
Kevin Kiley is a Rocklin native who spent his entire political career as a Republican before this year. He represented the 6th District in the California State Assembly from 2016 to 2022 before getting elected to Congress in 2022 in California's 3rd District, winning reelection in 2024.
This March, Kiley filed for reelection with no party affiliation and days later asked the clerk of the House to reflect his independent status on the official roster, effective immediately. He became the 10th member of Congress to change party affiliation since 2000 and the only sitting independent in the chamber.
Asked whether the decision was difficult, Kiley described it as the culmination of a series of events that showed how partisan and broken Washington has become and said it felt like the right thing to do "when the whole gerrymandering circus got out of control."
The circus in question was a nationwide drive to mid-decade redistricting. Normally, the redistricting process follows the decennial census. Required by the Constitution, this census sees changes to populations across the US and leads to potential reapportionment of representatives and redrawing of districts. This year, however, many states decided to engage in a redistricting war, including California.
California passed independent redistricting over a decade ago, which meant that redistricting mid-cycle would require a public vote. Proposition 50, the November 2025 ballot measure that allowed California to bypass its independent redistricting commission and pass a new Democratic-friendly House map before the 2026 midterms passed by nearly 30 points. The new map dismantled Kiley's 3rd District. Rather than challenge fellow Republican Rep. Tom McClintock in the safer 5th District, Kiley chose the much bluer 6th—the one that includes his hometown.
The Race
The redrawn 6th District covers portions of Yolo, Sacramento, and Placer counties, including West Sacramento, Natomas, parts of northern Sacramento, and sections of Roseville, Rocklin, and Citrus Heights. It was engineered to elect a Democrat: while Kiley's original district went for Donald Trump by four points in 2024, the new 6th favored Kamala Harris by nine points.
The June 2 top-two primary tested whether an independent incumbent could survive on that terrain.
He did.
Kiley led the seven-candidate field with 46,921 votes (24.3%), followed by former Democratic state Sen. Richard Pan with 44,805 (23.2%) and Republican Michael Stansfield with 38,823 (20.1%). Pan edged out Stansfield for the second runoff spot, narrowly avoiding a rare California race that would have boxed out a Democrat entirely.
The primary math cuts both ways. Kiley finished first without a party. But Democratic candidates combined for approximately 55.7% of the primary vote, meaning Pan's path in November runs through consolidating a coalition that already exists on paper, while Kiley must hold Republicans who just voted for Stansfield and win over unaffiliated and crossover voters.
On fundraising, Kiley currently leads Pan. Through their 6/30 FEC filings, Kiley has raised just shy of $3 million, while Pan is just under $1.1 million. Kiley is also sitting on $2.1 million cash on hand, having spent only a third of his total receipts during the primary. That’s compared to Pan’s $360,000.
Governing as the Only Independent
Kiley's answer to how independence has changed his approach in Washington is that it hasn't—it formalized it. "I always approach my role as being a representative of all constituents," he said in our interview. "Being an independent is a reflection of that."
He has a recent data point to cite. In June, Kiley's office received a 2026 Democracy Award from the Congressional Management Foundation for Best of Constituent Service — a competitive program that drew more than 150 applications from over 80 offices across both chambers, with 18 recipients selected across seven categories. In accepting the award, Kiley said his office has closed more than 6,000 individual cases, returning over $21 million directly to constituents and helped the district receive over $315 million in federal grants. Among the grants he points to is a $22.5 million award, secured working with both the Biden and Trump administrations, to address traffic congestion around Highway 65 and I-80.
The Reform Agenda: Redistricting First
Immediately bucking party leadership, one of Kiley’s first moves as an independent was to introduce a bill to combat the redistricting war that led to his defection from the Republican Party. His bill would prohibit states from redrawing congressional maps more than once every 10 years, after the census, unless a federal court orders it—a ban that would apply to red-state and blue-state gerrymanders alike. When House leadership declined to move it, Kiley introduced a discharge petition in May to force a floor vote, one of the few tools rank-and-file lawmakers have to bypass leadership.
The bill has drawn fire from both party establishments — which, for a candidate running against the two-party duopoly, is not the worst place to be. A spokesperson for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries dismissed it as "unserious legislation", while Kiley has also publicly criticized Speaker Mike Johnson for failing to advance legislation curbing partisan redistricting.
Beyond the mid-decade ban, Kiley told IVN he wants independent redistricting commissions in every state, open primaries and other reforms "so that you don't have the two parties controlling everything and a system that breeds people on the extremes rather than people who want to solve problems," and a voter ID requirement, which he notes most voters support. He also wants structural change inside the House itself: more avenues for getting bills to the floor beyond leadership discretion or the rare discharge petition, including giving bills a right to a vote based on cosponsor count, and a cultural shift away from party-line procedural votes. He notes that the party-line norm lets "a handful of people hold the whole institution hostage based on unrelated demands."
The Anti-Corruption Agenda
Corruption consistently ranks near the top of the issues independent voters care about, and Kiley's second major post-party legislative push targets it directly. In late June, he joined Democratic Reps. Kristen McDonald Rivet, Greg Landsman, and Eugene Vindman to introduce the No Profiting from Public Service Act, which would ban politicians, Supreme Court justices, and other federal officials (including executive appointees) from trading stocks and using prediction markets to wager on government and politics. The bill goes further than most prior stock-trading bans: it would also bar spouses and dependents from owning and trading stocks, and extend coverage to candidates for Congress.
"There are many ways to make government more transparent and accountable," Kiley told IVN, describing the principle behind the bill as ensuring officials "can't make money on public service."
The Caucus Question
Like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Angus King, who caucus with Democrats, Kiley has said he will caucus with Republicans through the end of the 119th Congress. What happens after that is genuinely open. Current House rules effectively require members to caucus with a party to receive committee assignments — a structural penalty on independence that Kiley wants eliminated. He told IVN he would ask the Speaker to change the rule so independents can serve on committees without joining either conference, and that in a new term he would decide his affiliation based on "what's best for constituents and what would restore the House to truly being the People's House."
That answer will not satisfy critics on either side. Pan's campaign argues the independent label is cosmetic, citing vote analyses showing Kiley has voted with Trump-backed positions in the overwhelming majority of votes where the president's position was publicly known. Kiley's counter is his record since the switch — including providing what he called the decisive signature on the discharge petition that forced a vote on the Ukraine Support Act, and voting against legislation to dismantle the Department of Education from his position chairing an Education and Workforce subcommittee.
Turning Out the Independent Vote
Kiley is candid about the disillusionment among unaffiliated voters, some of whom polling suggests plan to sit out November entirely. "I understand where a lot of folks are coming from," he said, pointing to primaries in many states that shut out independents and to his own singular status: "I'm the only independent member of the House even though half the country" identifies outside the parties. Independents, he argues, are "vastly underrepresented," and the only remedy is showing up, "making their voice heard and making their presence felt" by supporting candidates with a demonstrated willingness to work across the aisle and reform the system so collaboration becomes structurally easier, not just personally admirable.
The Debate Standoff
The clearest current flashpoint in the race is Kiley's challenge to Pan for five debates across the district, which he argues would prevent the race from being decided by campaign ads, party organization, and outside spending. Pan has yet to commit to a single date, venue, or format, though his campaign says he looks forward to having a conversation to help voters decide. IVN covered the standoff in detail.
Asked what he would tell voters on a debate stage, Kiley said he would start with his record—constituent services, federal grants delivered—and draw a contrast with Pan's twelve years in a state Legislature he characterizes as the most extreme in the country, presiding over the nation's highest cost of living. His sharpest charge: that Pan "always does what he's told by party leaders" and that his refusal to commit to debates reflects a campaign strategy of "reading talking points handed to him by Washington, D.C."
Assessment
CA-6 is the purest test case of the 2026 cycle for a question that matters well beyond Sacramento: whether a candidate can survive a map drawn specifically to end his career by refusing to play the game the map assumes. The newly drawn district's fundamentals favor Pan, with Harris winning the district by nine points. However, the incumbent advantage is real, and voters have demonstrated a willingness to vote for people who are willing to buck their party leadership to fight for popular reforms. His constituent services record suggests a candidate who has made many inroads in improving the lives for his constituents, but many of them are no longer voters in the district he hopes to represent because of the redistricting effort.
As districts become more gerrymandered, margins necessarily get closer. And as independent voters make up a larger and larger share of the vote, those smaller margins are going to result in unexpected outcomes. If Kiley wins in the newly-drawn CA-6, a district drawn to create a safely Democratic seat, the only independent in the House will have proven that the label can beat the gerrymander that created it.