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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowAs the Indiana Legislature considers whether to (or maybe by the time you read this, has decided to) redraw congressional district lines for political purposes, maybe it’s worth taking a look at an effort by a new group to support independent candidates.
Independent Indiana—the brainchild of Fort Wayne’s Nathan Gotsch, who ran and lost a congressional race in 2022 as an independent—launched this month with the goal of spotlighting and assisting candidates who run outside the traditional political party system.
Already, according to Gotsch, independents do better than you probably think.
“In 2023 and 2024, 244 independent candidates qualified for partisan races” in Indiana, Gotsch said in a news release. “More than half of them—52%—won. Those results point to something real happening in Indiana politics.”
Even some who didn’t win did fairly well. Nearly a third of independents who lost in the 2023-2024 election cycle received 30-49% of the vote. In many cases, that’s because the race didn’t feature candidates from both parties, meaning that a Republican might have run unopposed if the independent hadn’t stepped in or vice versa with Democrats.
Gotsch wasn’t so fortunate when he ran three years ago against then U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, a Republican who is now a U.S. senator, and Democrat Gary Snyder. Gotsch nabbed only about 5% of the vote, but that was the highest percentage among all independents running for Congress in a state with straight-ticket voting.
And it helped Gotsch see how difficult it is to get on the ballot as an independent. As he described the process in a Viewpoint column for IBJ last week, that burden increases as the size of the area of representation does. “In my case, I had to collect nearly 5,000 signatures from registered voters in my district (IN-3),” he wrote. “The Republican and Democratic candidates didn’t need any.”
An independent running statewide would need to collect 36,943 signatures to get on the ballot, he said.
Independent Indiana has launched a campaign to persuade Hoosiers that “politics in Indiana is broken” and that there’s a better way. “Because our primaries matter more than the general election, politicians feel forced to cater to the extremes instead of serving us all,” the group’s website reads.
IBJ is not opposed to the two-party system. We don’t think we’d go so far as to say that “politics in Indiana is broken.” But we understand the frustration that many voters feel when they live in districts or communities where the real race is in a Republican primary, for example, and not in the general election. Or in Indianapolis, where straight-ticket voting among Democrats is so ingrained that even a strong Republican candidate running for mayor often can’t mount a serious challenge.
So a movement to support independent candidates is an interesting one to watch. It could offer opportunities to candidates who don’t fit neatly in the Republican or Democratic box—something that’s probably true of most voters.
IBJ welcomes the conversation that Independent Indiana is launching and hope you’ll participate in it, too.•
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Interesting piece. I would add that, in 2025, every federal and state election absolutely needs to be using run-offs or ranked choice voting (“instant run-offs”).
This upgrade alone would mitigate much of the divisiveness and hyper-partisanship being forced upon us.