Angus King Jr., senator from the great state of Maine, is a sensible fellow who walks around the nation’s capital with a perpetually perplexed look. One assumes he’s deciding which of America’s two major political parties is vexing him more on any given day. Usually, it’s Republicans, though not always.
King ran for Senate in 2012 as an independent. Once in office, he decided to “caucus” with the Democrats. In Capitol Hill parlance, this means he hob-nobs with Democrats, receives committee assignments from them, and votes for a Senate Democratic leader. This made sense at first: Democrats were in the majority. It became less pragmatic when Democrats lost Senate control to the Republicans in 2014. But that year, he and moderate West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin politely rebuffed GOP entreaties to join them.
King’s stated rationale was instructive. He noted that Sen. Susan Collins, his colleague in Maine’s delegation, is a Republican. “I think it is in Maine’s interest to have senators in each camp,” he said. “The reality of the Senate,” he added, “is that nothing can or will happen without bipartisan support.”
But as the Republican Party has steadily headed further and further to the right while Democrats lurch leftward, bipartisan cooperation has become exceedingly rare. The 115th Congress is the most polarized in American history. National Journal magazine, which analyzes congressional voting records, first discerned in 2009 that no Senate Democrat was more conservative than any Senate Republican — and vice versa. It’s been the same every year since.
This is a radical departure from the historic norm. In 1982, when National Journal started doing these comparisons, 58 senators (and 344 House members) had voting records that put them somewhere in the middle of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. The upshot is that 40 percent of Americans now refuse to identify with either major political party. Yet, unless you count Bernie Sanders — and one shouldn’t — Angus King is the only independent in Congress. (Sanders calls himself a “Democratic Socialist,” but he ran for president as a Democrat only last year.)
If a small group of good-government advocates get their way, however, Sen. King will soon have company. Not a lot of company — a few fellow independents at the most — but that might be enough to run the country. In this scenario, neither Mitch McConnell nor Chuck Schumer will hold the gavel. The Senate leader would almost certainly be an independent or an independent-minded senator who relishes bipartisan cooperation.
If this sounds too good to be true, it probably is, but stay with me a moment.
The organization with this master plan is called the Centrist Project. Its subversive-sounding blueprint is the “Fulcrum Strategy.” Although evocative of a Robert Ludlum thriller, the stratagem is not all that complicated. The Centrist Project wants to field a slate of independents in the 2018 Senate midterm elections in states that might be receptive to its pitch. If even two or three of them win, this small cabal of independents would effectively control the U.S. Senate.
At that point, Democrats Joe Manchin and perhaps North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp would be presented with a more interesting alternative than the one offered Manchin in 2014, which was to leave a political party dominated by arch-liberals for one under the thumb of arch-conservatives. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, perhaps nonconformist Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina or Nebraska’s Ben Sasse would throw their lot in with the independents. Come to think of it, as I write these words, I’m reminded that John McCain’s first choice as a running mate wasn’t Sarah Palin. It was pro-choice, Democrat-turned-independent Joe Lieberman. So maybe McCain, too?
OK, so that would be wild, exciting and almost certainly good for the country. But is it even possible? Overcoming the entrenched duopoly is daunting, and that’s putting it mildly. In 2014, Kansas independent Greg Orman took the plunge — and found out how deep these waters can be. Articulate, well-funded, and passionate, Orman had much going for him, even in deep-red Kansas. Running against Pat Roberts, a 78-year-old incumbent of no particular distinction, Orman managed to chase the Democratic Party nominee out of the race and run neck-and-neck with Roberts for a while. But the GOP pulled out all the stops to defeat Orman and when the votes were counted that November, Roberts won by 10 points.
Nick Troiano, the Centrist Project’s executive director, also ran for Congress that year — with much less success. A Millennial Generation idealist who believes both parties are selling out the nation’s future with irresponsible fiscal policies, Troiano was only 24 when he launched a “citizen-funded independent campaign” in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District. Although he finished a distant third, the experience did not diminish his commitment. Quite the opposite. As young as he is, Troiano knows he and some of his cohorts can do better than their elders. Without irony, he compares Washington’s partisan squabbles that result in government shutdowns and legislative gridlock to two school kids fighting on the playground. “You can’t just tell them to stop and hope for the best,” he said. “They need adult intervention.”
The plan, as outlined by Centrist Project senior strategist Joel Searby, is to find viable independents to run in carefully selected states. The ones Searby mentioned were GOP strongholds Nebraska, Wyoming and Utah, along with New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut. The last three lean Democratic, but have a history of voting for independents or centrist Republicans. Two other possibilities Troiano and Searby mentioned were Texas and Washington state.
Can it be done? Troiano and Searby seem pleased that they’ve raised $600,000 in seed money to recruit candidates. Yet this is a paltry sum in American politics these days. Donald Trump could raise more in a single tweet, and it’s about what Bill Clinton charges to give a speech. But the man who gives them hope is as little known in Washington, D.C., as Trump and Clinton are notorious.
His name is Jason Grenn, and he’s a citizen politician from Alaska whose experience suggests that politics still is the art of the possible. A lifelong Republican, the 35-year-old Anchorage resident became discouraged by his party’s increasingly rightward tilt, and positively outraged when the state’s GOP-controlled legislature adjourned last year without seriously addressing the state’s historic fiscal crisis. He tried unsuccessfully to recruit someone to run in the Republican primary against his own state representative. No one would do it, so at 4 p.m. on June 1, 2016 — an hour before the filing deadline — he wrote his own name on a form.
Once in, Grenn was in it to win. He knocked on 5,000 doors in his district, mailed another 1,500 postcards and saw the local Democratic candidate drop out. Conservative Alaskans who’d rather hug a grizzly bear than vote for a Democrat found that they could vote for an independent. Long story short, Grenn won his election by 186 votes, partnered with another independent in the legislature and was appointed to the finance committee, which altered the equation in Juneau.
“If it happened there,” Nick Troiano says while we drive around the streets of Washington, “it can happen here.”
Carl M. Cannon is executive editor and Washington Bureau chief of RealClearPolitics.