Matt Shinners
Building off of our series covering independent candidates for federal races, this article is the first installment profiling independent candidates for governor. Our coverage of independent Senate candidates has centered on a legislative question—what it would take for independents to hold the balance of power in a chamber organized entirely around party. Governors face the opposite problem, and it is a more interesting one. An executive doesn't need a caucus. She appoints a cabinet, proposes a budget, directs agencies, and signs or vetoes what a legislature sends her, all without asking a party's permission. But she also has to govern alongside a legislature that owes her nothing. This series asks independent candidates for governor how they would use the powers of an executive office that no party controls, and what happens when those powers meet a statehouse that one party controls completely.
We start in Tennessee, with Lauren Pinkston*.
The Candidate
Lauren Pinkston is a seventh-generation Tennessean who grew up in rural Stantonville and now lives in Columbia. She spent most of her career not just outside politics but outside the country. After earning a PhD in International Family and Community Studies from Clemson, she moved with her husband and children to Southeast Asia. There, she launched three businesses employing survivors of human trafficking and political imprisonment while completing her doctoral research internship with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Laos. She returned to Tennessee in 2019 and taught business at Lipscomb University before leaving to run. This is her first campaign for office.
She did not plan to run for governor as her first campaign. She planned to run for something local, until her county mayor decided to seek another term—and then she looked at the top of the 2026 ballot and did not like what she found.
"There were no serious candidates running for governor in Tennessee, and that is such an important, important job," she said in an interview with IVN. She had considered a state legislative seat first and rejected it for a blunt reason: "I didn't want to be the only independent in our state ledge, just whining for two years."
The years abroad shape how she talks about the race. Pinkston lived under a one-party state in Laos and watched an election there in 2016 whose outcome the Communist Party had already decided. She brings it up when Tennessee Republicans reach for Cold War imagery—as when Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the GOP nominee for the seat, ran an ad set in a diner that her team had dressed up as a Chinese restaurant.
"The most communist thing we could do is have a one-party state," Pinkston said. "So, if we are against communism, let's not do that."
Why Independent
Pinkston describes herself as a lifelong independent who has voted across ballots since her early twenties and cast a third-party presidential vote in 2016. "I've been a lifelong independent, and I've never found myself at home with either party," she said. Asked where specifically she falls outside both, she gave three answers.
On fiscal policy, she said she believes in "a strong fiscal policy" that she does not think exists in either party anymore. On abortion, she said she values "all life as sacred" but cannot align with the Tennessee ban, which many (both supporters and detractors) characterize as the strictest in the country: "[T]hat is putting women's lives at risk here." Her platform calls for repealing the total ban and replacing it with exceptions for lethal fetal anomalies, rape, incest, and trafficking, while opposing taxpayer funding for elective abortions.
On guns, she said she believes in protecting the Second Amendment while treating unsecured firearms as a child safety emergency—her platform backs secure storage requirements, universal background checks, and a temporary transfer pathway modeled on laws in 21 other states.
"Those are some of the criticisms I get on both sides," she said. "But it's where I feel very strongly about standing my ground in the middle." On all policy areas discussed, she pulls from principles and policy ideas on both sides to show where they’re right, where they’re wrong, and how she would find balance between what she characterizes as the two extremes.
The Race
As with most independent campaigns, the money gap is significant. Through the most recent filings compiled from the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance (pulled August 10), Pinkston has raised $342,264—including $98,182 in personal loans—with $17,620 cash on hand. Blackburn has raised $10.51 million and holds roughly $6 million in cash. Democratic nominee Jerri Green has raised $850k and has $118k cash on hand.
Pinkston's support, however, leans more local. Her contributions are 91% in-state, a higher share than Blackburn's 68% and Green’s 78%. She is also the only independent to actually post campaign finance numbers. In a state where only 25 signatures are required to get on the gubernatorial ballot, a field of around two-dozen candidates has appeared. Pinkston is the only independent on that list to have numbers reflecting the ability to run a real campaign.
Despite this, no public poll of the Tennessee governor's race has tested Pinkston by name. The general election matchups on file—Beacon's April survey showing Blackburn over Green 51-27, and an August 2025 Quantus poll showing 49-28—are two-way ballots that fold every other candidate into "undecided." In both polls, that residual category sits at 22 to 23%, highlighting that the preferences of nearly a quarter of the electorate isn’t being properly captured by the existing numbers.
The Coalition She Expected vs. The One She Actually Found
Pinkston launched expecting to build a coalition weighted toward Democrats—roughly 60-40, she said. The opposite happened.
"I'd say 80% of my calls are coming from Republicans now," she said. Her strongest regions are college towns, particularly rural ones: Knoxville, Jackson and Madison County, Chattanooga, and Cleveland, with about 70% of her support concentrated in Middle Tennessee. She described the core as "the more intellectual voter who has a strong faith lens."
She knows this partly because her website lets any voter book a phone call with her directly, and she has kept two days a week open for them all cycle. She described the range: someone who called only to pray over her; a woman in a same-sex marriage who wanted to ask whether Pinkston would work against her and her partner; and a former election denier who found her because someone left one of her campaign cards in a public restroom and now serves as one of her regional leads.
She has committed to continuing the calls from the governor's office. "That opportunity to talk to real people," she said, "helps us to keep our finger on the pulse of a state."
Her argument for why any of this can work rests on turnout. Tennessee ranked 51st out of 51 in the 2022 midterms, with 38.6% of registered voters participating. "We have to reframe the conversation around Tennessee being a deeply red state," Pinkston said, "because we had the lowest voter turnout in the entire nation last midterm." She views getting those non-voters to the election booth as her path to a win in November.
Governing Without a Party
Here the gubernatorial case diverges sharply from the Senate one, in both directions.
An independent governor of Tennessee would hold real unilateral power. She would appoint a cabinet without clearing names through a party apparatus—the point Pinkston made first when asked what she values most in leadership. "Number one is surrounding myself with people who are smarter than me," she said, describing an intent to appoint people "who are excellent at what they do and who are brilliant in their trade, not people who have given me a lot of money or people who have been the most loyal to me." She framed the freedom to change her mind as a governing asset rather than a liability.
But Tennessee's governor has one of the weakest vetoes in the country. A veto is overridden by a simple constitutional majority in each chamber—the same number of votes that passed the bill in the first place. An independent governor facing a Republican majority would have no reliable ability to stop legislation.
Pinkston's answer is to work around the veto rather than through it. Her central proposal is a legislative accountability tool run out of the governor's office: verified voter input collected on active bills and mapped publicly in real time, with weekly reports sent to all 33 senators and 99 representatives. She points out that Tennessee has no citizen ballot initiative—changing state law requires an act of the General Assembly—so public preference has no direct route into policy. "That needs to be public source data," she said, so that everyone is aware of where the majority of the state is on key issues.
The second half is softer but, by her account, equally deliberate: dinners at the governor's residence with legislators from both parties and their families. She described a statehouse where "there are representatives and senators right now in the state ledge that are actively avoiding each other in the halls, and heckling each other in the halls." Her assessment: "It feels like I'm in middle school when I am there to watch what's going on."
On redistricting, she supports an independent redistricting commission, along with open primaries, nonpartisan county elections, and state-produced nonpartisan voter guides.
Cost of Living, Energy, and Data Centers
Pinkston's economic argument centers on the middle class as a structural load-bearing wall. She describes seven tech companies owning a third of the stock market and warns that data center operators "are going to buy your entire county because they can."
She uses SNAP restrictions as her example of how state policy transmits costs upward. Grocery stores price around selling large quantities of items with significant markups like soda, she argues, so cutting those sales raises shelf prices for everyone. "When the middle class gets pinched, then everybody gets pinched." Her platform opposes SNAP restrictions on snacks and soda, backs reinstating summer EBT, and calls for eliminating the grocery tax, which she says can be offset by closing affiliate business tax loopholes and keeping shoppers in Tennessee's 40-plus border counties rather than traveling out of state for purchases.
Her energy answer for the first 90 days is less about generation than coordination: Tennessee's local electric utilities operate largely independently and, she says, often are not talking to one another about capacity or cybersecurity. She supports accelerating nuclear investment including small modular reactors, protecting TVA from privatization, and clearing local regulatory barriers to renewables. On timelines, she is candid that nuclear power will pay off later—"that's a decision in the first 90 days that pays us forward 10 years from now."
She also calls for a statewide moratorium on new data center construction pending real siting standards. Asked what those standards would need to include, she named self-supplied power, water infrastructure investment, and noise limits. She would also like the facilities underground, with waste heat routed to greenhouses—a proposal that doubles as farm policy, giving soybean growers squeezed by tariffs a revenue stream that does not require selling the land.
Education, Childcare, and Incarceration
Education is where Pinkston is most fluent and most expansive. A former fourth-grade teacher, she argues that Tennessee's unusually large private-school and homeschool populations leave the public system carrying concentrated need without a diverse funding coalition. She wants to expand education offerings: a Montessori school in every county, nature schools for kinesthetic learners, more STEAM programs, and certification pathways letting students graduate with a credential like a CNA license.
Her platform pairs this with reduced benchmark testing, higher teacher pay, licensing adjunct instructors for career courses, expanded TCAT scholarships, and screen-limit legislation drawing on Jonathan Haidt's work. She also wants to redirect Education Freedom Scholarship funding toward early childhood education.
She also would focus on closing a childcare slot deficit she puts at 90,000, with 24-hour centers sited at workplaces and schools rather than programs running nine to two. "I'm not talking about more Head Start programs," she said. She is looking to solve for childcare issues that working parents actually face.
On criminal justice, her platform commits to reducing Tennessee's incarcerated population by 15% in a first term through behavioral health and education investment; second-chance programming; and a full assessment of the state's private prison contracts. She frames it fiscally, citing small counties facing $20-30 million jail rebuild costs when they can’t even afford EMS services: "So much of our tax dollars are being consumed in this obsession with incarceration." She also backs restoring voting rights for people who have completed their sentences, in a state with among the most restrictive felony disenfranchisement regimes in the country.
On healthcare, she argues the money already exists. Tennessee is one of a handful of states whose insurance investigative unit is not attached to the attorney general's office or the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and she describes a black market in health data operating in that gap. "We could fund healthcare for everybody in Tennessee if we were able to crack down on that more."
Assessment
Pinkston's advice to other prospective independents doubles as a description of her own bet. Do not take direction from anyone still tied to a party, she said, because "anyone who has experience in politics cannot speak to this moment." Trust that a balanced person with reasonable policies is already where most voters are, she advises, and accept that the work of finding your voters will be harder than the major party candidates. "It's a lonely place some days, but it's the best place to be."
The conventional read of this race is that Tennessee is a Republican state that will elect a Republican governor, and every national forecaster rates it Safe or Solid R. Pinkston's read is that Tennessee is a state where 61% of registered voters did not participate in the last midterm, where more than half of legislative races recently offered no choice at all, and where the resulting margins measure the absence of alternatives rather than the presence of enthusiasm.
Both readings can be true, and the second does not automatically produce a win for an independent. But the question she is testing is an interesting one that resonates across the country in increasingly polarized states, where one party dominates the electoral outcomes: is a state's partisan lean a fixed property of its voters, or an artifact of who has bothered to give them something to vote for? Tennessee has spent two decades producing the least participation in the country. Pinkston is the only candidate in the race treating that as an opportunity. If she can excite a voting bloc that has previously sat out of the elections, she’ll have a dedicated voter base that no one else is speaking to.
And she’ll have a chance to show the country that solidly red or blue states have change simmering just beneath the surface.
*The author of this article previously worked with Lauren Pinkston when she was a volunteer at the Forward Party.