New independent movement wants to deny both parties a House majority

Washington Post

10-05-2025

LIVONIA, Mich. — During focus-group sessions in this bellwether state, two groups of swing voters were asked last month to give an instant assessment of the two political parties.
The Democratic Party came under attack: 'old, slow … lost … a joke … rudderless.' The image of today's Republican Party wasn't much better, viewed largely through President Donald Trump: 'far right, no middle … a joke, too … united … delusional.'
Behind the screen that blocked her from the participants, Lura Forcum nodded with approval. As president of the Independent Center, Forcum is leading a bid to rally voters who dislike both major parties around alternative candidates who will appeal to the vast middle.
A former marketing executive, Forcum has joined up with several disaffected former Republican-leaning operatives to do intense research on voter attitudes. Their next step will be to recruit candidates willing to take long-shot bets at winning House seats and upending a political system that's been built around a two-party Congress since just after the Civil War.
The sessions, conducted over 90 minutes each in mid-April, showed these voters would like more options. They overwhelmingly voted for either Trump or Kamala Harris, but not out of abiding respect toward either major party.
'You have two actors who've insulated themselves from competition, but what it's allowed them to do is stop responding to the market. So, of course, it's going to invite in a competitor,' Forcum said in a follow-up call Thursday.
Her cohorts, Adam Brandon and Brett Loyd, are the top political strategists. Brandon served as president of FreedomWorks until last May, when he had to shutter the libertarian-aligned organization that lost relevance in the Trump era. Loyd, who once served on Trump's polling team, now runs a nonpartisan polling and data firm while overseeing the research and focus groups for the Independent Center.
Their objective is both relatively small and, in terms of impact, potentially massive.
Rather than trying to run a third-party presidential campaign that would require billions of dollars and untold resources to get ballot access in all 50 states, they hope to win up to a handful of House races with centrist candidates who will not accept support from either major party.
In this era of such narrow margins, that might deny Republicans and Democrats the 218 votes needed for the majority and create a protracted negotiation for a coalition government.
'We're going to that new center. So I will say that people are scared of this being a spoiler. Yes, we're trying to wreck the system. We're trying to disrupt the entire duopoly,' Brandon said during Thursday's video call.
For three straight elections, the House majority has not topped 222 seats. Currently, House Republicans hold just 220 seats. Picking off three to five seats might be enough to block either party from the minimum needed for the majority.
Brandon envisions a House with a small bloc of independents who can negotiate and determine which party gets the majority, based on the independents' demands. 'We want a debt commission. We want to start studying this issue. We want to start backing this type of reform,' he said.
The three understand the uphill nature of their task. Not since 1990, when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) won his first congressional race, has a new candidate won a House race as an independent. And for more than 140 years, either Democrats or Republicans emerged from elections with a clear House majority.
But Loyd noted that the House provides so many possible openings, unlike a presidential race or a massive Senate campaign.
'There's 435 seats in the House. We've got 435 chances,' he said.
Their ripest targets would be the highly educated suburban districts that have swung back and forth over the past 15 years. But some solidly Republican or Democratic districts, with incumbents who haven't worked hard in an election in a long time, also offer opportunities.
The most competitive House races in a midterm election draw roughly 300,000 voters, with fewer than 250,000 casting ballots in noncompetitive races with seemingly entrenched incumbents. Those latter races also see as little as $1 million in total spending.
Their pitch is either incredibly naive or ahead of the times, in terms of campaign finance laws and technology.
They only want their candidates to raise enough money to hire a few top aides. All other functions of the campaign will be handled through a super PAC (somehow no one else bought the rights to 'Independent PAC' until now) that will fund voter mobilization and advertising. And they want their candidates to emerge as late as possible in terms of filing deadlines to get on ballots, a type of political sneak attack for which the traditional parties are not preparing.
The Independent Center doesn't have a single galvanizing issue. Ross Perot's Reform Party movement in the 1990s grew out of concerns about the national debt, while the Republican Party emerged in the 1850s with its antislavery agenda. They intend to rely heavily on AI to mine issue trends in districts to find the right issues to move independents.
This agenda is more focused on a broken political system.
With so much voter cynicism, Loyd imagines how one of his candidates could mock the other two major-party nominees in a general election debate. 'Wouldn't it be great if the candidate could win without raising millions and millions and billions of dollars from lobby groups and special interests? Wouldn't that be great?' Loyd proclaimed.
Exit polls showed a surge in voters calling themselves independent, growing from 26 percent in 2020 to 34 percent in 2024.
Ideologically, moderates are now the dominant force in politics: 42 percent of voters considered themselves moderate last year, compared with 35 percent identifying as conservative and 23 percent liberal.
Recent conventional wisdom has focused on the concept that most independents regularly vote with one major party or the other, with less than 10 percent of all voters truly being up for grabs in a close campaign.
Forcum doesn't buy that prospect.
With a PhD in consumer psychology and years in academia, Forcum believes both political parties have ignored the growing bloc of independents while devoting most of their budgets to negative ads that appeal to their most faithful supporters.
'We're leaving out all these people in the middle who dropped out of politics because it is unpleasant, absurd and inhumane,' she said. 'And if we're offering them a path to political engagement that's more pleasant than that, I think that we have a huge opportunity. I don't think it's nearly as crazy as it otherwise would sound.'
A year ago, Brandon spoke at a political conference aligned with traditional Reagan-Bush conservatism. He told the crowd that they had lost to the MAGA movement, that it had fully taken over the Grand Old Party.
'It was literally like I killed a cat in the room,' he said. 'I came off the stage and not one person wanted to talk to me.'
Except Forcum, who walked up to him and found a kindred spirit. Loyd also had his own disillusionment with traditional politics.
In 2016, he was flying high with Kellyanne Conway's polling company, correctly predicting a Trump surge that propelled him to an upset victory. Three years later, when the reelection team's polling leaked, showing Trump headed for defeat to Joe Biden, he got fired.
'You're catering to the fundraising crowd. And it's truly childish,' Loyd said of polling for traditional party candidates.
Their target audience is younger voters, particularly in the millennial and Gen Z groups. They have grown up in a culture where they can choose anything to watch or listen to, not constrained by what the main TV and radio stations are offering at that moment.
'If you're under 50, you get it,' Brandon said, describing how his pitches to donors go.
In Livonia, about 20 miles west of downtown Detroit, Loyd questioned two groups of 10 voters, only two over age 50. While nine voted for Trump and five voted for Harris, the others either did not vote or voted for a third-party option.
Loyd asked them about next year's Senate race in Michigan. Only one said, right now, he would support the Republican. Two were undecided, and two said they would vote for the Democrat.
Five said, if the right candidate appeared, they wanted to vote for an independent. Now this new group needs to find candidates and prove independents can win.
'We have got to get it right once or twice, and that's all it's going take,' Brandon said. 'Prove the point, and then it's going to be a groundswell.'