Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.
During his brief time in the Idaho House of Representatives, Todd Achilles often stopped to admire a photograph from the state’s 1899 legislative session, and not just because some of the turn-of-the-century hairstyles and beards were “wild,” he said.
In the photo were lawmakers from four distinct parties, along with a handful of unaffiliated candidates.
“That was a period just like now,” Mr. Achilles said. “People were fed up with the party system and looking for something different.”
Today, he’s part of an effort to bring that same kind of something different to Idaho and other parts of the West. Mr. Achilles, an unaffiliated candidate for U.S. Senate, is among a wave of independent challengers to entrenched Republican incumbents or heirs apparent in red states.
In Idaho, where unaffiliated voters outnumber Democrats 2 to 1, Mr. Achilles is the more prominent and moneyed of two independents challenging the incumbent, Jim Risch. Independents also are running for Idaho governor, both of the state’s U.S. House seats and 12 state legislative seats.
Next door in Montana, another independent, Seth Bodnar, is running for the Senate as an independent, as is Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Brian Bengs in South Dakota. Another, Bill Hill, is running for Alaska’s lone House seat. All those candidacies say a lot about the state of the Democratic Party west of the Mississippi, excluding what’s known, affectionately or not, as “the left coast” — California, Oregon and Washington.
