Nathan Smolensky
A week after the voting had actually happened in his district, independent congressman Kevin Kiley was declared the top vote-getter in his CA-6 jungle primary. Kiley, who had been elected as a Republican but left his party following redistricting, earned few headlines for advancing without major party backing. But he might be the most consequential winner of the night.
Kiley joins a growing field of high-profile independent campaigns that will be making noise in November. Dan Osborn, a blue-collar union leader running for Senate in Nebraska, leads his Republican incumbent by five points in recent polling. Todd Achilles, also making a Senate bid, leads incumbent Jim Risch in head-to-head polling in Idaho. Seth Bodnar, a Green Beret and former university president running for Senate in Montana, has outraised every partisan opponent in the race.
There are more making House bids. In Alaska’s at-large congressional district, Bill Hill — a commercial fisherman, construction worker, teacher, and small business owner — leads incumbent Nick Begich by five points on an informed ballot. Nate Powell, a firefighter in Eastern Washington, leads his own incumbent by six in recent head-to-head polling. And now Kiley, who earned more votes in the primary than any of his Republican or Democratic opponents, faces a head-to-head contest of his own in California.
Should some of these candidates win in November, it would be much more than an upset. It would be the emergence of a replicable model for challenging the major parties—one that could fundamentally change the math of gerrymandering
It could bring real competition and accountability to districts that have gone without either and could bring about the greatest incentive shift in our politics in more than three decades.
Here's what makes the model work: nearly all of these candidates are running in one-party strongholds—districts or states so lopsided that the general election has traditionally been a formality. In these races, an independent isn't a third option dividing a competitive field; they're a second option in a race that otherwise has only one.
That's also what makes independent success in these strongholds so threatening to the existing system—and so important for fixing it.
Gerrymandering, as a political strategy, only works when the math is predictable. Districts get drawn lopsided because lopsided districts reliably produce lopsided outcomes. The moment that an independent can run as a credible option in a "safe" seat, the entire calculus of rigging a district falls apart. An environment where neither Democrats nor Republicans are able to viably compete becomes one where independents can jump in and make it a contest.
The same dynamic creates something that has been largely absent from American congressional politics: genuine accountability. Safe districts produce unaccountable legislators—representatives who answer to their primary base and no one else, because no one else has ever posed a real threat. Independent competition changes that calculus immediately, and not just in the cycle where it happens.
If enough of these candidates win—if a small but meaningful bloc of independents arrives in Washington unwilling to swear fealty to either party machine—something more significant becomes possible. Neither major party holds a working majority without them. The zero-sum logic that has paralyzed Congress begins to break down. Compromise stops being a liability and starts being a survival tool. The competing perspectives of both parties, currently weaponized against each other, can begin to function as what they were always supposed to be: complementary inputs in the search for workable solutions.
We're not there yet. If we look closely at some of the promising polling for these independent contenders, we may ask how much the informed ballot, used in the Alaska and Idaho surveys, represents likely voter behavior. After all, voters on election day aren’t working with perfect information.
And indeed, the informed ballot tends not to reflect what would happen were the election to be held today, but it shows something important: the more voters know, the likelier they are to vote independent. As much as the notion that independents never win can be self-defeating, the realization that they can compete, and that they are competing, can be self-propelling.
For Kiley. Osborn, Achilles, Bodnar, Hill, Powell, and many more, a long road remains between now and November. Visibility and perceived viability remain the greatest challenges for independent candidates, and the major parties will spend heavily to reinforce the narrative that none of what they’re doing can work.
But the opportunity to change our politics, in 2026, is real. And it deserves our attention.
Nathan Smolensky is a political messaging and communications strategist specializing in independent campaigns, and the author of Common Ground from the Ground Up.