The Independent Center uses AI to identify congressional districts where independent candidates are likely to defeat a Democratic or Republican candidate. His goal is to elect at least a handful of independent candidates to destroy the two-party system on Capitol Hill.
Glenn Harvey for NPR
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Glenn Harvey for NPR
The emergence of AI assistants is rewriting the rhythms of everyday life: people feed their blood test results in chatbotsby contacting ChatGPT for advice about their personal life and relying on artificial intelligence for everything from travel planning to doing homework.
Now one organization suggests that artificial intelligence can do more than just make everyday life more convenient. It says this is the key to changing American politics.
“Without AI, what we're trying to do wouldn't be possible,” explained Adam Brandon, senior adviser at the Independent Center, a nonprofit that studies and engages with independent voters.
The goal is to elect multiple independent candidates to the House of Representatives in 2026, using artificial intelligence to identify districts where independent candidates are likely to succeed and discover diamonds in the rough candidates.
At a time when control of the House of Representatives teeters on a knife's edge, winning even a few seats could ruin either party's chance of winning a majority and upend the current functioning of the House.
This is a bold proposal in a system that has not seen a new independent candidate win a seat in the House of Representatives in 35 years.
However, the data shows a rise in the number of moderate and independent voters. Gallup found A record 43% of Americans are pursuing an independent label in 2024. Exit polls that year showed that 34% of voters identified as independentsup from 26% in 2020.
“There are a huge number of people who, for various reasons, can't stomach either party,” said David Barker, a professor of government at American University. “This is the first time in a long time that a majority of Americans now identify as independent, and it seems to signal a pretty important shift.”
Brandon said that the shift is what makes it time to disrupt the status quo.
“It’s like Uber and taxis. You had a clearly flawed system that operators were entrenched in, and it took radical changes to completely bypass it,” he told NPR. “And that's how we feel now. People get so stuck on “Republican” and “Democrat” and we think, “Well, there's something else.”
“We are political fighters”
Trying to break the stranglehold of the two-party system is an uphill battle, battling political orthodoxy and many naysayers.
But the strategists of the Independent Center are far from political novices.
“We are political fighters,” said Brandon, who served as president of FreedomWorks, a conservative grassroots group that helped turn Tea Party activists into a political force before closing its doors last year. “We've built a team of people who know how to do this. We're not going to be weaklings.”
Brandon works closely with Brett Loyd, who runs The Bullfinch Group, a nonpartisan polling and data firm that oversees polling and research for the Independent Center. He previously worked on President Trump's campaign team when the president was a candidate.
“I'm a statistician. I kind of joke that I worked at the RNC because they offered me a job before the DNC,” he said with a smile. “My work is about numbers, sentiment and game theory. It’s not necessarily Republican or Democratic.”
He makes clear that the goal of their work is not to completely eradicate partisanship.
“It won't work everywhere. It will work in very specific areas,” Loyd said. “If you live in a hyper-Republican or hyper-Democratic district, you should be represented by a Democrat or a Republican.”
But he used artificial intelligence to identify 40 seats that don't fit that pattern, where he says independent candidates could make inroads among voters fed up with both parties. The independent center plans to nominate about 10 candidates by spring with the goal of winning at least half of the elections.
Brandon predicts the victories could prompt House moderates to switch allegiances.
“I had one Republican [member] tell me in your office, 'I'm too chicken to do this right now,'” he recalls. – “But if you can do it, I will join you.”
From Reddit mining to LinkedIn matching
Their proprietary AI tool, built by an external partner, was years in the making.
While focus groups and surveys have long provided insight into American sentiment, AI can track what people are saying in real time.
“A survey is a snapshot in time: on Tuesday at 11 o'clock you got a call or you were in a focus group, that's how you felt, but then you went home and your views changed. We can see it,” Brandon said.
They use AI to understand voters' key issues and concerns, and to find districts where an independent candidate might emerge.
“A county that's 50% Republican and 50% Democratic that's constantly swinging because of who shows up on a given night, is it anything truly independent compared to a county in Arizona where the majority is independent, but they hold their nose and vote?” Lloyd explained. “We look at the level of voter participation. Which counties have really low turnout because these people don’t want to go to the ballot box.”
He's also looking at districts with younger voters, who he says support an independent approach.
“When I talk about Gen Z and millennials, people keep rolling their eyes and saying, ‘kids,’” he said. “Well, these kids are going be more than half the electorate in the next presidential elections.”
The next step is to collect data and find out what your dream candidate looks like.
The independent center recruits candidates both from people who contact the organization directly and with the help of AI.
They can even run their data through LinkedIn to identify potential candidates with specific interests, careers, and volunteering experience.
“They don't usually do self-promotion, but their actions leave a mark,” Loyd said, citing the example of someone who volunteered at an event that was featured in a local newspaper. “We ask our AI to find that trail.”
The AI also tells you where a candidate has the best chance of winning.
Brandon points to one instance where a candidate was considering running in his home district. The AI showed that the neighboring area was the best option.
“Thirty minutes away, perfect landing,” he said. “And that's what [that person's] are going to do because we found that they match perfectly.”
“What’s wrong with ruining something people don’t like?”
One of the criticisms that Brandon and Loyd admit they hear often is the idea of “spoilers” are non-winning candidates whose presence on the ballot affects the candidate's victory.
“It’s a partisan, archaic line,” Loyd said. “What’s wrong with ruining something people don’t like?”
He said people who criticize independent candidates' entry into races as spoilers have an ingrained interest in the current system.
“The Republican and Democratic establishments still live in a binary world. It's Coke or Pepsi, it's Ford or Chevy, it's MSNBC or Fox News,” he said. “It works for people who watch MSNBC and Fox News. Everyone else? We no longer live in this binary system.”
Brandon said the only thing to do is bend over.
“We're going to take a spoiler because we're messing up a pretty corrupt system.”
