This election season, declare your independence

In a presidential cycle that will likely see two major party candidates whom most Americans would rather not see in the White House again, independent candidates offer a better alternative.

Oct 13, 2023

Just barely less than one year and one month from now, Americans will head to the polls by the millions to cast their ballots in the next presidential election. In politics, that’s simultaneously right around the corner and several lifetimes from now.

Pro-life Democratic presidential candidate Terrisa Bukovinac and American Solidarity Party presidential nominee Peter Sonski recently served as sidewalk counselors outside a Planned Parenthood in Washington, D.C.

But a majority of Americans say they would prefer neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden run again, an outsized number don’t want either man to get another term in the Oval Office, and a larger than normal number of people in both parties have registered dissatisfaction with their own party’s presumptive nominee.

Meanwhile, polls show anywhere from a little more than half to nearly half of all Americans are open to voting for a third party or independent candidate for president. General support among Americans for the emergence of a new political party has reached 63 percent, a 7-point bump from a year ago and the highest recorded number since the polling firm Gallup first started asking this question in 2003.

Given all these trends, and given that we at the Civic Update have consistently pushed back against the tribally partisan narratives in both major political parties, we wanted to give our readers an overview of the lesser-known candidates who could be coming to a ballot near you.

Full disclosure: as I’ve written before, I am an independent who does not plan to vote for either major party’s presumptive presidential nominees. I have consulted for multiple independent presidential candidates this cycle, and I have friends who are actively working for a number of the already-announced independent presidential candidates I’ve outlined below.

While there is an active GOP primary, the media has consistently covered that primary. There have already been two debates with most of the declared candidates – though, notably not frontrunner Trump, who so far declined to attend – with more debates on the way.

So, we’ll focus instead on several Democratic Party candidates whom the media has not covered as extensively, as well as a handful of independent and third party candidates of interest to our readers.

Democratic Party candidates

Teresa Bukovinac

Pro-life progressive activist Terrisa Bukovinac has worked for nearly a decade through a secular and democratic socialist framework to address abortion violence.

Two years ago, Bukovinac founded Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, a leftist pro-life group that, among other activities, engages in direct action at abortion clinics nationwide. She also founded the group Pro-Life San Francisco, and served as the president of Democrats for Life of America.

Bukovinac has said she intends to target states where ballot access is easiest and plans to run ads that show the violence of the abortion industry.

Marianne Williamson

Bestselling author and political activist Marianne Williamson is making her second run for the presidency, having sought the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2020.

Williamson began her professional career as a spiritual leader in the Unity Church, which grew out of the late 19th century transcendentalist movement. The church says it represents "positive, practical Christianity" and describes itself as “for people who might call themselves spiritual but not religious.”

Williamson founded Project Angel Food, a non-profit organization that has delivered more than 16 million meals to ill and dying homebound patients since 1989. The group was created to help people suffering from HIV/AIDS.

Cenk Uygher

A new entrant to the Democratic Party primary, Cenk Uygher is the founder and outspoken host of the progressive alternative media organization The Young Turks, and a former host on MSNBC.

In 2017, Uygher co-founded the group Justice Democrats. Eleven members of the House of Representatives identify as Justice Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Pramila Jayapal, Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush.

Uygher, who ran for the U.S. House unsuccessfully in 2020, faces a possible constitutional challenge, given that he was born in Istanbul, Turkey. As a naturalized U.S. citizen, Uygher says he intends to challenge this issue up to the Supreme Court, citing previous legal precedent that the Court has not yet applied to the specific case of presidential eligibility.

Independent and third party candidates

Peter Sonski

The nominee of the American Solidarity Party, a party that has grown out of the Christian Democratic tradition, Peter Sonski is near the end of his second term as an elected member of a regional school board in Connecticut.

Sonski worked for eight years as communications director for the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., and served as assistant editor at the National Catholic Register.

Sonski previously served as a municipal board of finance member and served on the board of selectmen in Somers, Connecticut.

Cornel West

Dr. Cornel West serves as the Dietrich Bonhoeffer professor of philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary. West has written 20 books, including Race Matters and Democracy Matters.

West describes himself as a democratic socialist, and most recently served as a public surrogate for the presidential candidacies of Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. West supported the Green Party’s nominee Dr. Jill Stein in the 2016 general election.

West briefly began his race for the presidency in the little-known People’s Party before deciding to pursue the nomination of the Green Party. Most recently, West decided to strike out as an independent candidate for president, explaining his desire to go directly to voters in multiple interviews on alternative media outlets like Tim Black TV and the Sabby Sabs show.

Robert Kennedy Jr.

The son of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. began his run for the presidency in the Democratic Party primary. At a major speech and rally in Philadelphia this week, Kennedy announced he would run instead as an independent.

His work as an environmental attorney earned recognition as TIME Magazine's “Hero of the Planet”. His career started at the environmental nonprofit RiverKeeper, where Kennedy prosecuted polluters. He won cases against General Electric for toxic runoff and against ExxonMobil, mandating they clean up tens of millions of gallons of spilled oil.

Kennedy has recently stirred controversy as an outspoken critic of COVID-19 policy. Some analysis has shown he draws more support from Republicans and independents than from Democrats, leading to speculation that his independent candidacy may serve as more of a hurdle for the GOP than for his former colleagues in the Democratic Party.

How and why to vote for a lesser-known presidential candidate

Unlike their better-known competitors, the candidates above will face hurdles achieving ballot access. So, supporters will need to take a more active role in helping their chosen candidates, either by contributing to the campaigns, helping to gather ballot access signatures in their state, or both.

But why vote for a candidate who may not be as likely to win? Why not simply pick, as so many do, the lesser of two evils?

Many Christians have wrestled with these questions over the years, but they began to achieve more widespread cultural currency with Trump’s first run for president. We started to see the emergence of a theologically traditional Christianity that strayed from the political orthodoxy in both parties, with politically heterodox pushback on both major party nominees found, among other places, at the Gospel Coalition website and in Christianity Today.

In many ways, the And Campaign itself was a response to this longstanding but simmering unease many Christians felt with both political parties.

And what of the more practical objection often raised about independent candidates, namely that they will serve as “spoilers” in the election? Will voting for an independent only get the candidate you most oppose elected as a consequence of voting for your preferred candidate instead of for the lesser-evil candidate?

I would posit that those who raise this objection in connection with presidential elections either don’t grasp how presidential elections work, or would prefer that you don’t grasp how they work.

Though some argue we should, we don’t have a national popular vote for president in this country. Instead, we have an Electoral College and 50 popular elections in our states. Almost all these elections are winner-take-all, meaning that the winner of the election in a given state gets all the electors. Only two states – Nebraska and Maine – apportion electors proportionally.

Because most states are not particularly competitive, this means that every single person who voted for the losing candidate in their state could have voted for an independent candidate without changing the outcome of the race. It also means that millions of people who voted for the winning candidate could have voted for an independent candidate as well, given that the winner only needs 50 percent plus one vote in order to get all the electoral votes in a state.

Even if you were concerned about the spoiler effect, whether out of an abundance of caution or because you live in a so-called swing state – the shifting number of more competitive states where polls show a tighter race between the two major-party candidates – you could use a workaround called VotePact to ensure you don’t trigger the spoiler effect with your vote. You simply find a friend in your state on the opposite side of the political aisle who also feels trapped by the lesser-evil system. Both of you can make a pact to vote for the independent or third party candidate of your choice, which eliminates the spoiler effect for both of you. The candidate need not be the same candidate, as long as neither of you vote for the candidate in your respective major parties.

Ultimately, we need electoral reforms that will eliminate the spoiler effect. While politicians love to blame voters who choose to step outside the two parties to vote their conscience on Election Day, the reality is that we’ve known about the spoiler effect since the earliest days of the republic. We have more modern electoral reforms that could easily eliminate this effect and make our democracy more robust, but leaders in both major parties have chosen not to enact these reforms.

Given this, I have to wonder whether they would rather keep you trapped by the spoiler effect than to fix it. I say this rotten system has already been spoiled by the major parties, who act against the interests of people in such brazen ways that many have been turned off from voting altogether.

This coming Election Day, I encourage you to declare your independence. We need more democracy, not less, and that’s what independent candidates represent. We won’t fix our politics by continuing to vote for the corrupt parties who have already broken our democracy.