High-profile candidates try to break Dem, GOP control
A former lawmaker in Oregon who as a young woman flew a helicopter around an erupting Mount St. Helens is aiming to shake up state politics by running as an unaffiliated candidate for governor.
Betsy Johnson, who served in both the Oregon Senate and House and who once belonged to — and then quit — both the Republican and Democratic parties, sees a path to victory with the increasing polarization of the two major parties.
And so do candidates running as independents in major races in at least two other states.
In California, Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento County district attorney whose office led the prosecution of the Golden State Killer, is running as an independent for state attorney general, having left the Republican Party in 2018. She needs to survive California’s primary on Tuesday. The top two votegetters move on to the general election.
“I’ve been told a million times that I have to be a Republican or a Democrat to win the race for Attorney General. I’ll say it a million more times: No I don’t,” Schubert tweeted confidently last month.
And in Utah, former CIA case officer Evan McMullin is running as an independent in a U.S. Senate race. Astonishingly, Utah Democrats are backing McMullin instead of one of their own in hopes of defeating incumbent Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican, in the decidedly red state.
Among Republican voters McMullin is wooing are those who don’t support former President Donald Trump. McMullin recently tweeted his opponent “aligns himself with Donald Trump time and time again. That includes working behind the scenes to help overturn the 2020 election and keep Donald Trump in power.”
The Republican and Democratic parties have dominated politics in America since the 1850s. These days, they’ve staked out sharply opposing positions on gun control, abortion rights, policing, climate change and much more, leaving a lot of middle-ground opportunities for independent and third-party candidates.
As of one year ago, 31% of registered voters identified themselves as independents or members of third parties in states that allow them to indicate partisan affiliation on registration forms, according to an analysis by Ballotpedia. A total of 40% registered as Democrats and 29% as Republicans in those 31 states, Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
But when it comes to the ballot box, that slice of unaffiliated/third-party voters hasn’t translated into independents claiming many victories.
Trump’s election as president in 2016 arguably widened the divide between liberals and conservatives. But that didn’t cause large numbers of unaffiliated voters to abandon the two big parties in either the 2018 or 2020 elections in favor of alternative candidates, analysts say.
“What ends up happening with voters is they typically respond to surveys or in focus groups, talking about how they want somebody outside of the two parties, but then in practice they tend to vote and behave mostly like (Democratic or Republican) partisans,” said Jake Grumbach, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington.
There are only two independents in the U.S. Senate, Angus King, a former governor of Maine who won a landslide victory in 2012, and Bernie Sander of Vermont, who was first elected to the Senate in 2006. Both caucus with Democrats.
Retired professional wrestler Jesse Ventura’s winning run as a Reform Party candidate for governor of Minnesota, in 1998, is a distant memory.
Former radio personality Cory Hepola made a stab this year at following Ventura’s footsteps, as part of Andrew Yang’s new Forward Party.
But Hepola dropped out of the Minnesota governor race on Wednesday, saying it is “unlikely that 2022 will be the breakthrough year.”
Johnson, though, is betting on dissatisfaction among voters to boost her run in Oregon. Her campaign war chest already tops $8.6 million, including $1.75 million from Nike co-founder Phil Knight. Her reported total was more than the Democratic and Republican candidates combined. Johnson has garnered endorsements from a former Democratic governor and from a former Republican U.S. senator.