Matt Shinners
If you take a look at the most prominent independent candidates running for office in 2026, a pattern quickly emerges: almost all are veterans.
In Montana, Seth Bodnar is a former Army Green Beret and West Point graduate. In Nebraska, Dan Osborn is a former Navy machinist. The list goes on. Karen Matthews in California. Todd Achilles in Idaho. Ty Pinkins in Mississippi. Bob Chew in Colorado.
Americans have long placed more trust in military figures than virtually any other class of public servant. According to Gallup, the U.S. military ranks second among all American institutions in public confidence (behind small business and ahead of science).
A separate Gallup survey conducted with the With Honor Institute found that 55% of Americans say prior military service would make them more likely to support a candidate for office, a higher share than those who said the same about government or business experience.
That same study showed that 78% of Americans agreed that veterans are able to put the country's interests ahead of their own personal or partisan interests—a quality voters say they're looking for and can't find in the two parties.
That credibility intersects with something else: veterans themselves are increasingly rejecting party labels. A survey of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America members saw 55% of respondents saying they don't affiliate with any party, exceeding the broader electorate’s rate of 45%.
Paul Rieckhoff, the founder of Independent Veterans of America (IVA), sees all of this as infrastructure waiting to be activated. "Veterans are the last group of Americans that people trust," he said. "That's a political asset."
IVA is an organization built on the premise that the veteran community's social standing, earned through service and untethered from either party, is exactly what an independent political movement needs to break through.
But Rieckhoff isn't just observing that veterans lean independent. He's actively recruiting them to run for office outside of the two-party system, while also organizing the broader veteran community as a political force. That combination of candidate recruitment, community building, and brand management is the engine of IVA's theory of change.
"We are a celebrity, a billionaire, or a big win away from the breakthrough moment," Rieckhoff said. "Someone has to be brave enough to go first."
Rieckhoff's theory of change starts with a simple observation: the fuel for a third-force political movement is already there. Voters aren't looking for a moderate who splits the difference between the parties; they're looking for a vessel for their anger at the direction in which America is heading, a way to vote against the entire system.
"People don't want Coke versus Pepsi anymore," he said. "They want more options. And all the trendlines are against the parties, especially among young people, who aren't joining anything."
Shawn Griffiths
That outrage, in Rieckhoff's view, is precisely where veterans fit. Americans have long turned to military figures in moments of political frustration, from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy to George H.W. Bush. Veterans carry a credibility that no party label can manufacture, and at a moment when nearly every institution has shed public trust, it is the one identity that still commands broad, cross-partisan respect.
IVA was built to organize and deploy that asset systematically, both through candidates and community leaders. Rieckhoff is explicit that he's looking to build over decades, not election cycles. But that still starts with work for 2026.
IVA’s goal is 100 independent veteran candidates across federal and statewide offices, a number he says the organization is on track to hit, constrained more by internal bandwidth than by candidate supply. Six have received formal endorsements; at least three dozen more are in various stages of their internal vetting process.
The candidates range widely in profile and competitiveness. Some, like Nebraska's Dan Osborn and Montana's Seth Bodnar, have raised enough money and attention to be taken seriously in competitive races. Osborn’s campaign has shown enough legitimacy to lead the Democrats to bow out of the race and throw their support behind him.
Others are running in races where the goal is more infrastructural: to build a presence, establish a community, and prove the model works at smaller scales. Rieckhoff views each of these approaches as key to a broader movement he views as bigger than any single candidate or cycle.
The structural barriers all these candidates will face are real and well-documented. Without party infrastructure, independent candidates must gather petition signatures to appear on the ballot, raise money without the benefit of donor networks the parties have spent decades building, and build voter databases with information that the parties already have ready to go for their candidates.
And they have to do this while fighting a media environment that defaults to framing these campaigns in terms of a two-party system the candidates are trying to reject.
Bodnar's campaign illustrates this reality. To get his name on the ballot, his campaign needed to gather over 13,000 signatures from Montanans. While this process helped introduce him to many voters, such a monumental effort is costly (using paid signature gathering efforts, estimates can run from $7 all the way to $45 per signature).
Expected legal challenges that will see many signatures rejected means campaigns typically collect significantly more than strictly necessary (Bodnar’s campaign said that they submitted nearly 30,000).
Party-built infrastructure is also, at times, significantly more advanced than independent tools, leading some candidates to rely on these systems to fuel their independent campaigns. Bodnar, for instance, uses the Democrat-affiliated ActBlue, which has allowed Republicans to point to something specific in trying to paint him as a Democrat in disguise.
While candidates and campaigns are a focus of IVA’s work, Rieckhoff is also watching issues that he believes independents are uniquely positioned to own. He points to Iran as an example of outrage that cuts across every demographic and partisan line.
"The outrage around Iran is higher than most political experts appreciate," he said. "It's one of the most important stories in the world."
Veterans, he argues, carry particular credibility on those questions precisely because they've lived the consequences of political decisions others only debate, even as the Democratic Party fields their own candidate in the Montana Senate race.
The longer-term scenario Rieckhoff describes is more ambitious still. He believes that enough money, the right candidate, or a single high-profile defection from the major parties could trigger a cascade.
Incumbent members of Congress—he names figures like Jared Golden, Don Bacon, and Thomas Massie as examples—haven't left their parties, he argues, because the parties still protect them. But the protection is contingent. "Somebody is going to break that seal," he said. "Someone has to be brave and be first."
Each of these individuals either lost their primary or decided not to run for reelection in 2026, potentially freeing them up to make such a move.
Rep. Kevin Kiley recently left the Republican Party to run for reelection as an independent, but he has focused his independence on promoting bills that aren't popular with Republican leadership rather than identifying himself with a broader independent movement.
But until one of these groundswell moments happen, IVA's strategy is to build the community and find the candidates. By organizing veterans as leaders in the independent space and leveraging the high esteem Americans have in them, Rieckhoff is looking to make the independent path viable in most people’s minds.
By recruiting veterans to run as independents, he hopes infrastructure will be built that can make it easier for that breakthrough candidate to decide to run and win earlier. That will, according to Rieckhoff, change the public conversation around non-party candidates, paving the way for a wave of independent candidates to break through in future cycles.
"We're not just looking for one win," Rieckhoff said. "We're looking for a movement."