Independent candidates are popping up all over. We see them running for the U.S. Senate in South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, and Nebraska. In most of these races, Democratic candidates have stepped aside to avoid splitting the anti-Republican vote.

But what does this mean for the Democratic Party?

My friend Bob Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, takes up this question. Although he believes the damage to the Democratic brand is sometimes overstated, he recognizes that it is a severe problem in the Great Plains and Mountain West:

These are socially conservative states that used to send economically progressive Democrats to both houses of Congress. New Deal farm, public power, and economic development policies were good for the West. But the damage done to the Democratic brand by the combination of Democratic national leaders going left on cultural issues and right on corporate issues was especially potent in this part of the country.

Nevertheless, Kuttner worries that deference to independent candidates could further weaken the Democratic Party. But this argument rests on a questionable assumption—that Democrats remain a viable political force in most of these states.

They abandoned ship years ago.

Of the roughly 719 state legislative seats in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho, Democrats do not even field candidates in 255 (36%) of them in 2024.

Independent candidates are not pushing Democrats aside. They are filling a vast political vacuum—a one-party landscape that offers no meaningful political home for working people who once elected Democratic populists.

Kuttner much prefers the fusion strategy used by the Working Families Party:

Still, as a national strategy, substituting progressive independents for Democrats would be a recipe for killing the party. Fusion, the recipe of the Working Families Party, allows the best........

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