Matt Shinners
Independent voters now represent the largest share of the American electorate, and yet they remain largely unrepresented in executive 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 office 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 Maine, that candidate is current State Senator and gubernatorial candidate Rick Bennett.
I. The Candidate
Rick Bennett is a lifelong Mainer from Oxford. He came of age politically in the early 1980s, drawn to the optimism of the Reagan-era Republican message, and spent the next four decades inside the party structure, serving multiple terms in the Maine House and Senate.
He became Senate president in 2001 through a power-sharing arrangement with an evenly divided chamber, chaired the Maine Republican Party from 2013 to 2017, and served as a Republican elector for Donald Trump in 2016.
He ran as the Republican nominee for Maine's 2nd Congressional District in 1994 and sought the Republican Senate nomination in 2012. Outside of elected office, he has run ValueEdge Advisors, an institutional investor engagement firm he founded in 2014.
In June 2025, after being reelected to the state Senate the previous year, Bennett announced he was unenrolling from the Republican Party to run for governor as an independent. He describes what drove him there in terms he'd clearly been sitting with for a while: the parties, he says, have gone "deeper, darker, and dumber into this cesspool of politics that is really driving a lot of ordinary people not just out of politics, but out of the public space entirely—and I think that's intentional."
He continued: "There are people who are putting their kids through college by keeping us fighting with each other rather than solving issues."
II. The Race
The 2026 Maine governor's race is an open seat, with the incumbent term-limited out. The field settled after the June 9 primaries into a three-way general election: Democrat Hannah Pingree, Republican Bobby Charles, and Bennett.
Pingree is the frontrunner in polling and with political handicappers. A former Maine House Speaker and policy advisor in the Mills administration, she has raised more than $2 million for the general election and carries a long list of institutional endorsements.
Charles, a lawyer and former naval intelligence officer who worked for several Republican administrations, won a crowded primary and has aligned himself closely with President Trump.
Bennett has raised approximately $617,000 to date—behind both opponents but more than enough to field a professional campaign staff.
Maine has elected two independent governors in its history: James Longley (1975-79) and Angus King (1995-2003), both under the same plurality system that applies to this general election. Bennett noted pointedly that both won without ranked-choice voting.
"This is a straight-up three-way race, and I can win it on that basis," he said.
III. Why Independent, and Why Now
Bennett's explanation for leaving his party reflects that he spent a lot of time as a leader in a major political party. And yet, he voted against Republican attempts to ban transgender athletes from female sports. He was one of two Republicans to vote for a package addressing Maine's MaineCare deficit. He was already governing as an independent before he formally became one.
What changed in June 2025 was the decision that modeling cross-partisanship from inside the GOP was no longer sufficient—that the system itself needed to be challenged directly. "The only way to do it is to adopt a different model away from the two parties. I'm running as an independent because I want to govern. I intend to govern as an independent."
He describes the bipartisan feedback inside the State House: sitting lawmakers from both parties approach him in the corridors and say, quietly, "Thank God you're running as an independent. This place is deeply broken, and it needs fixing."
The people closest to the machinery, he says, know best how failed it is.
IV. What He's Hearing, and What He'd Do About It
Bennett has organized his platform around three pillars: making life more affordable, growing and rejuvenating Maine's economy, and restoring trust in government. The voters he is appealing to, he said, understand that. They are not looking for short-term wins; they are looking for a governor willing to work on long-term solutions.
On affordability and the economy, he mentions conversations he has with employers about the difficulty of attracting the new workers they need to grow because of housing costs—a different perspective on an issue than is usually brought up.
He brings up the fact that Maine has the oldest population in the country when discussing healthcare costs. Key problems he’d like to address are the loss of dozens of nursing homes in rural Maine, a closed hospital, and shuttered birthing centers. He also wants to address infrastructure spending in a world where there are fewer non-electric cars on the road, meaning that the gas tax used to fund things such as roads in Maine goes down drastically.
The third pillar, restoring trust in government, is enough of a focus that earlier in the week of our interview, Bennett announced a package of fiscal prudence and transparency measures.
He will create an Office of Inspector General that reports directly to the governor, designed to respond to whistleblower complaints immediately rather than wait for the state auditor's methodical review cycle.
He will conduct a top-down review of state contracting and procurement, with a stated goal of making no-bid contracts the exception rather than the default. And he will overhaul the state's freedom-of-access laws, citing a story where a news station was told it would cost $200,000 to access information that should be freely available to the public.
He plans to appoint Maine's first Chief Digital Officer, with a mandate to drive the cost of government records access to near zero. He will also split the Department of Health and Human Services—Maine's largest agency, which he described as simply too large to be held accountable—into two separate entities.
He frames the accountability argument not just as a good-government exercise but as an antidote to voter alienation. People who feel like they have no visibility into what their government is doing are people who disengage. Engagement, he argues, requires transparency, and transparency requires systems.
V. The RCV Primary and the Path to November
Maine's ranked-choice voting system applies to the primary and to federal general elections, but not to the gubernatorial general. Bennett noted the quirk in the RCV data from this year's primaries: 77% of Democratic primary voters did not select Hannah Pingree as their first choice; 63% of primary voters did not choose Bobby Charles as their first choice.
Combined, that's roughly 260,000 primary voters whose preferred candidate didn't prevail—voters Bennett described as voters he's actively working to earn.
On electoral reform more broadly, he favors the Alaska model: a fully open primary across all candidates, with the top finishers advancing to a general decided by ranked-choice voting. Maine's current semi-open primary—where unenrolled voters can choose which party's ballot to request—was where Bennett voted for the first time in the Democratic primary this June.
He supports continuing and expanding RCV, though he was candid about an implementation problem in this year's primary: the count took a long time, with some ballot collection issues, which he worries feeds election integrity concerns even when the outcome is legitimate.
VI. Representing Independents
When asked how he would represent the interests of independents if he became governor, he said he doesn't plan to govern for any particular slice of the electorate, because the job doesn't permit it. "I'm just going to represent every Mainer. That's what they want. I don't check people's party ID."
He drew on a more personal frame than most: he was Senate president when Angus King was serving his first term as independent governor, and in the months of this campaign, he has met separately with three of King's former cabinet members. Each of them told him the same thing, without coordination: the best thing about serving in King's cabinet was that the question "what's good for the party" was never on the table.
The question was always: what's good for Maine.
VII. Assessment
The polling and resource gaps are significant, and the presence of both a Republican and a Democrat in the race means that not only is this a three-way race, but one where members of each party might fear a vote for an independent gives the other party’s candidate an edge.
But the structural conditions are more favorable to an independent in Maine than almost anywhere else in the country. The state has elected independent governors twice. The unaffiliated voter population is 32.3% of the population, even if they are currently leaning strongly toward the Democrat.
And Bennett, unlike most candidates who describe themselves as independent, has a legislative record that highlights a willingness to buck party leadership, even if he himself served in that capacity at times.
His path runs through the primary voters whose candidates didn't survive RCV, the independents that make up an equal share of Maine’s electorate as members of either party, and through whatever slice of moderate Republicans conclude that Charles is too closely aligned with Trump to be credible in a state that voted for Harris by seven points in 2024.
Whether that coalition adds up to a plurality in a three-way race is what November will answer.
This interview was conducted July 16, 2026.