A 27-year Army officer with three deployments looked at Congress and decided the problem wasn't which party was winning - it was that both of them were. So Jason Faler is running in Oregon's 6th with no letter behind his name.
Jason walks us through the road from four-generation Oregonian to combat tours in Baghdad and the Horn of Africa to healthcare administrator and professor - and the "frog in the boiling water" moment that finally pushed him to run. He lays out the number almost nobody in Oregon knows: unaffiliated voters went from 22% of the electorate in 2012 to roughly 40% today, which means the largest voting bloc in his district belongs to no party at all. We get into why so many veterans end up in nonpartisan reform, why he won't just run in a primary and take the easy path, and what it actually costs to get on a ballot when your two opponents ran unopposed.
This episode is sponsored by the Independent Voter Project and produced by Olas Media. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Episode Highlights
Jason Faler, an independent congressional candidate running in Oregon's 6th Congressional District, joined the Independent Voter Podcast to explain why he's rejecting party labels in his bid for Congress.
A fourth-generation Oregonian and soon-to-be Army colonel with nearly 27 years of military service — including multiple combat tours in Iraq and intelligence work in the Horn of Africa — Faler also brings two decades of healthcare administration experience and teaches healthcare law at OHSU/PSU's joint school of public health.
He left the Republican Party after his first deployment to Baghdad, growing disillusioned with hyperpartisanship and political extremism. Now running as a true independent candidate, Faler argues that both major parties have abandoned the American people in favor of party loyalty, fueling the toxic polarization, congressional gridlock, and lack of political decorum that define modern Washington.
At the heart of Faler's independent political campaign is a data-driven case about the changing American electorate: independent voters now make up the largest voting bloc in Oregon's 6th District — and in most congressional districts nationwide — jumping from roughly 22% in 2012 to nearly 40% today.
Faler contends that the old political calculus branding a vote for a third-party candidate or non-affiliated candidate as a "wasted vote" or "spoiler vote" no longer holds, given how dramatically the independent voter movement has grown.
Still, he faces steep structural barriers to ballot access that major-party candidates don't: independent candidates in Oregon must gather thousands more petition signatures than their Democrat and Republican rivals just to qualify for the general election — a systemic obstacle Faler says is designed to protect party insiders and shut out independent politicians and nontraditional candidates.
Faler's campaign taps into a broader national conversation around electoral reform, ballot access reform, and voter dealignment, echoing themes championed by groups like Veterans for All Voters and the ranked choice voting movement. He argues that veterans, having sworn an oath to the Constitution rather than to any political party, are natural independents — and that Congress needs more members who understand the true cost of war and sacrifice.
Ultimately, Faler frames his run not as a symbolic protest candidacy but as a genuine bid to win, positioning Oregon as a potential trailblazer for independent political representation and a model for breaking the two-party stranglehold on American democracy nationwide.
