Matt Shinners
When Sarah Czech and her team went door to door in Rapid City, South Dakota, last month, they were inviting complete strangers to come talk politics. Around 15 to 20 of them came to each event.
"They came in and they were a little skeptical, but they left with a huge smile on their face," Czech said. "They were giving hugs to everybody."
Czech works at the intersection of two kinds of organizations that have been quietly growing alongside this year's independent candidates. She is an associate at the Osmanthus Group, a consulting firm that works with independent campaigns, and since late August she has also worked on contract with Moving America Forward (MAF).
Her view from the doorstep offers a look at a question hanging over the whole independent movement this cycle: what happens to the energy these candidates have generated, win or lose?
An unusual year, and an infrastructure catching up
There are more serious, well-funded independent candidates on the ballot this year than in any recent cycle. In Czech's estimate, it may be more than ever before.
In South Dakota, Brian Bengs became the sole challenger to Republican Sen. Mike Rounds after Democratic nominee Julian Beaudion suspended his campaign in August. In Nebraska, Dan Osborn is again mounting a high-profile independent Senate run. Idaho has an unusual cluster: Todd Achilles for U.S. Senate, Sarah Zabel in the 1st Congressional District, and former state Supreme Court Justice John Stegner for governor.
Around those campaigns, a support structure has started to form. National organizations such as the Independence Center, Unite America, and the Forward Party are working on the movement's ideas and its national profile. Newer groups are offering campaign services. Caroline Anderson has spent years working on campaigns, and in January she expanded her practice into the Osmanthus Group, bringing Czech on as her associate.
Czech said what the national infrastructure still lacks is people knocking on doors and talking to voters one-on-one.
"Obviously that requires money, and that requires time and all these other things," she said. MAF's events are designed to fill part of that gap. As a 501(c)(3), the group frames its work as civic education and voter outreach rather than electoral campaigning.
What South Dakota said back
The Rapid City trip was a first look at a small Western city for many members of the team, who live in Boston, San Diego, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Czech said that was part of the value.
"We can be so caught up in the hyperpartisan warfare of what's going on when you are involved in the political movement that it's hard to take a step back and see things through the eyes of somebody who is not involved in this as much as we are," she said.
The people who showed up were not activists. They considered themselves independent, but most were not deeply engaged in politics. Attendees ranged from 18-year-olds starting college to people in their 80s talking about their grandchildren. Some told the team they had not left their house in months, and that this was the first time anyone had invited them to something political that felt positive. Czech paused while recounting this to say it was emotional to talk about.
The word Czech heard most often was "hope." One attendee, a man who had protested the Vietnam War in South Dakota decades ago, told the team that his generation had stood up and done the work in its time, and that now he needed to encourage his daughters that it was theirs.
On issues, Czech hears independents gather around the national debt; the war in Iran and foreign policy more broadly; health care; and political reform; along with the economy and corruption, which she said matter especially in mountain states like Idaho and South Dakota. "We all really want to be able to afford gas, and we all really want to be able to afford groceries," she said.
But she sees the deeper common thread as orientation rather than any single position. "Where Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and progressives are united against issues, I see independents united for something," Czech said. That something, in her telling, is love of country and community, and the question of how to protect and improve them.
She also heard frustration with a broken bargain, particularly from registered Republicans. Several told her they had voted for what they thought would lower their prices, and felt that the opposite had happened. Czech described what she saw as a lack of trust rather than active distrust: skepticism toward politicians in general, and uncertainty about what a candidate without an R or a D next to their name actually means.
That uncertainty is a hurdle at the ballot box, she said, but an asset across the dinner table. Partisans struggle to hear each other through the caricatures they hold of one another. An independent arrives without one.
"There isn't a national caricature built around us, and so the masks can come down," she said.
Why having real candidates matters
Czech said the candidates have changed what outreach looks like. She recalled Unite America staff telling her that when they began organizing around the independent identity in 2017, people's reaction was flat refusal to engage.
Now, she said, organizers can point to someone specific. "There is literally somebody who's viable and not scary and not crazy and [not] weird that is running in your area," she said.
Voters often arrive already knowing the names, Czech said, citing Bengs, Achilles, and Zabel. She credited Bengs directly for the South Dakota trip, saying the team went to Rapid City only because he gave them an example to show people.
"That's what they provide," she said. "A clear example of what an independent leader could look like."
Idaho next, and the work after November
The team heads to Idaho October 10–13. Czech is especially optimistic there: where many states have one viable independent, she said, Idaho has several.
South Dakota taught logistical lessons, like the fact that apartment buildings in snow country are locked, unlike open-air complexes in Southern California, so canvassers need a local contact before they arrive. The bigger lesson was about priorities. Czech said organizations can get fixated on RSVP counts, but the point is the people who actually show up.
"We're leaving, but they live there," she said. "We have to encourage them to be builders in these cities."
That shapes MAF's plans after Nov. 3. The team intends to contact everyone it met, starting with a survey on the issues people care about and how they want to stay involved, and then help them form local chapters so that places like Boise and Rapid City become hubs for independent organizing.
"Candidates and elections are temporary, but this movement is lasting," Czech said.
Asked how to sustain hope if none of these candidates win, Czech acknowledged that disappointment would be real. But she pointed to what now exists that did not before. She has about 20 people in Rapid City she can text.
Her message to them, she said, would be simple: two years ago, you had no one. Now, there are 20 of you. Two years from now, there could be 200.
For a movement long defined by voters who belong to nothing in particular, that may be the most consequential result of this cycle, whatever the returns say on election night.