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 Idaho's 1st Congressional District, Sarah Zabel is running for the US House of Representatives.
The Candidate
Sarah Zabel spent 31 years in the Air Force, retiring in 2018 as a major general specializing in communications, computer systems, and cybersecurity. She is an Air Force Academy graduate who counts 19 moves in 31 years—Japan, Germany, Qatar, and nine states—before settling on land she bought in Bayview, on Lake Pend Oreille, in 2013 while still on active duty. She took possession of the house she built there in 2020.
An Independent—But Not an Anti-Partisan
Zabel's explanation for running outside the parties is meaningfully different from most independents in this series, and she is careful about the distinction. She is not against parties. She is waiting for one to come back.
"I have a coherent political ideology, and it is not represented by either of the parties," she told IVN. She was a Republican for three decades, becoming an independent in 2018 because "Republicans were full MAGA, and I could not embrace the MAGA philosophy at all. I could not embrace the Democratic philosophy at all."
But she frames that as a potentially temporary condition. "I'm a used-to-be Republican, Republican heritage. Would like to be a Republican again, but they got to come back this way." And she extends the hope to both sides: "I really hope both of the parties come back to the middle. But I'm not confident of it."
She has a historian's patience about the whole arrangement. "We've had different parties come and go over time. I don't know if these two parties will survive or if they will be replaced by something." Her own party of the future would center "on business, make sure it's fair to the people, have a safety net."
She even rejects the standard polling shorthand for people like her: "The terminology that people like Gallup use, which is 'independent leans Republican'—no, that still doesn't describe it, because this independent would vote against MAGA every single day of the week."
The label she does use came from an unusual, and very modern, place. Having written out her policy positions, she fed them into an AI model and asked what political philosophy they described. It came back Eisenhower Republican. Her campaign now makes the case explicitly, arguing the Republican Party abandoned the tradition that "built the interstate highway system, the GI Bill, and the research investments that created American technological dominance" in favor of the belief "that tax cuts alone would provide the investment necessary to feed the economy."
The Analytical Method
Zabel's platform is the most extensively developed of any independent House candidate this series has covered—in fact, it might be one of the most extensively developed of any candidate for any office. She also organizes her platform in an interesting manner, starting with four convictions from which individual positions are derived. Rather than building her platform around policy, she builds it around principles, letting the specific ideas grow from her core beliefs.
She describes writing it as a research project. When she decided to run, "you can't just say no, no, no. You've got to say what does yes look like? What does good look like?" So she taught herself healthcare policy, Social Security, economics, and tax—"all that stuff that I just assumed that the people that we hired to do the job, that they were doing the job. Bad assumption."
Where a worked-out consensus already existed, she adopted it rather than inventing her own. On Social Security, she took most of a Brookings Institution framework she describes as deliberately bipartisan. Her site is also candid about what remains unfinished: AI and digital integrity is flagged as the area "where policy is least developed—the problem is genuinely new."
She also runs a live Q&A on the first and third Tuesdays of every month, open to anyone. Asked what people bring to them, she described a mix. Some attendees come to accuse her of being a Democrat in disguise. Most come to talk about healthcare.
Affordability and the Debt
Zabel treats affordability and the national debt as the same ledger viewed from two sides. Her platform notes the country now pays more in interest on the debt than it spends on defense, and she supports "tax reform that asks more from those with the highest earnings—not to punish success, but because the alternative is a debt trajectory that no serious person defends," paired with spending and regulatory reform.
On the cost of living in Idaho specifically, her prescriptions are structural: drop broad tariffs to lower construction and insurance costs; build a workforce sufficient to construct housing; target tariffs where necessary to create positive outcomes for American businesses and farmers; and revamp temporary work permits to match actual agricultural needs of the state.
Idaho's dairies and ranches, she notes, operate year-round, while the H-2A visa program covers nine months of seasonal work—a mismatch she says leaves crops in the field and businesses on the edge.
Healthcare
Healthcare is where her approach leads to the clearest break with both parties. She argues the Democratic focus on insurance addresses one of four cost centers and ignores three others—hospital services; physician services; and prescription drug costs—that grow at 5.8% a year by CMS projections.
Her core diagnosis is that the standard market answer doesn't apply. "Health care doesn't behave like a normal market: adding competition doesn't automatically bring prices down, and in rural Idaho there often isn't any competition to add." Adding a second hospital, her platform argues, is like building a second airport next to the first—you get underutilization of both, not price competition.
She does not endorse Medicare for All, and her reasoning is the rural cross-subsidy: rural hospitals don't break even on Medicare and Medicaid patients today and stay open by charging private insurers more, so extending government reimbursement rates to all payers removes that. "For Idaho's First District—where in many communities there is one hospital, one clinic, one option—that gamble isn't abstract." She is explicit and realistic in a way that many business leaders but few politicians are, admitting that if her own structural reforms fail, some other ideas she currently dismisses "deserve[] a serious hearing."
Her health care proposals run across all four pillars: site-neutral payments and antitrust enforcement against hospital consolidation; funded comparative effectiveness research and real price transparency; patent reform, expanded Medicare negotiation, international reference pricing, and a surtax on excess pharmaceutical profits; and using that surtax revenue as a bridge to restore expired ACA subsidies.
She puts the local stakes at an estimated 35,000 Idahoans who lost Marketplace coverage when enhanced subsidies expired at the end of 2025.
Corruption
On corruption, Zabel supports banning congressional stock trading and is immediately clear about its limits: "even though that still leaves a loophole, because you can't really ban the trading of somebody's spouse or somebody's child."
This proposal reflects a recognition of deeper problems in our public sphere. “I fully agree that corruption is rampant and it's awful, and we need to do something about it. And I'm not even at the point where I can put together the list of things that we need to do."
Outside of a stock trading ban, she puts forward several ideas on institutional accountability to tackle public corruption, which her platform treats as the structural version of the same problem: restructuring inspectors general to report directly to Congress, strengthening whistleblower protections, and restoring congressional oversight of federal agencies and the use of military force.
She cites the War Powers Act and Idahoans detained at a family event in Wilder in the same breath.
The analytical approach to her policy platform also informs what she won’t put forward in her platform. Asked about primary reform—which she calls "a huge part of making our government answerable to the people"—she declined to propose a federal fix.
"Primaries are a state issue, and I believe that the federal government needs to be limited." Campaign finance reform, she noted, is the federal lever that helps, and where she’d focus her reform efforts.
The Case Against Fulcher
Zabel's critique of Rep. Russ Fulcher, seeking a fifth term, is that he substitutes gestures for governance. She points to his sponsorship of legislation reviving short-term, limited-duration health plans—"junk insurance"—as a non-solution to healthcare costs, and to his introducing a One Subject at a Time Act weeks after voting for the roughly 900-page One Big Beautiful Bill Act he had campaigned against on fiscal grounds.
She also faults him on public lands—more than 60% of Idaho is federally held, and Fulcher has backed transferring and selling some of it, while she supports the Public Lands in Public Hands Act.
The Race, and the Network
ID-01 is rated R+22, the 21st most Republican district in the country. Fulcher won the May 19 primary with 78.2%; Kaylee Peterson took the Democratic nomination with 87.1% and faces Fulcher for the third consecutive cycle after losing by 45 points in 2024.
Fulcher has raised $662,615, holding $244,699 on hand through late April.
Zabel's coalition is aimed at moderate Republicans first. She lives in Bonner County and says some of her volunteers are "hardcore MAGA flag-flying people who are actively campaigning for me" because "they want things to work. They want to fix Social Security. They want to fix the debt."
One of the most useful things she disclosed is infrastructural. Asked which organizations have helped, she said the most valuable group has no name at all—an ad hoc network of independents across neighboring states that she credits Todd Achilles's campaign manager with convening.
"[I]t's just been a godsend." Achilles, the independent challenging Sen. Jim Risch, is now in a one-on-one race after the Democratic nominee withdrew this week. Zabel has also hired a team from "a growing list of consultants who work specifically with independents"—a scarce commodity, since most operatives risk "poisoning themselves with their preferred base by supporting an independent overtly."
Her advice to prospective independents is operational: start early, map your own network, learn how your state and district parties actually work, and find a compliance professional immediately.
Assessment
Asked what would make her time in Congress worthwhile, Zabel gave a deadline rather than a wish list: put Social Security on track, get debt reforms started in a form both parties can claim as their own, and get ahead of AI and deepfakes before the 2028 presidential election.
"Turn the Titanic away from the iceberg within six years. That's my goal."
ID-01 is not a district anyone flips on the merits of a policy platform alone, and Zabel is running against a four-term incumbent with a heavy resource advantage. But she has produced the most substantive body of policy work in this series, and a rationale for independence that doesn't depend on hating parties, only on noticing that neither one currently represents her.
Tariffs are hitting the district in which she’s running particularly hard, and her policy platform and way of talking about problems makes it hard for anyone to seriously argue she’s a Democrat in disguise.
The appeal of her approach—practical, rational, results-oriented—has already seen some Republicans buck the party to serve as volunteer leads on her campaign. This November will test how deep that shift can go.