Can AI Help Independents Win? One Nonprofit Thinks So

A nonprofit wants to challenge the dominance of the two-party system in American elections. Its leaders are betting that artificial intelligence holds the key.

The Independent Center, a nonprofit that engages with independent voters, is building out an AI-powered tool that it says can help independent candidates identify potential voters, home in on campaign messages and respond to hot-button issues in a rapidly changing media environment. 

The idea, according to the project’s leaders, is to help independents compete with Democrats and Republicans by giving them the kind of campaign tech that non-party-affiliated candidates have long lacked.

“The reason independents haven’t succeeded in the past is because there’s no infrastructure,” Adam Brandon, a senior adviser at the Independent Center, told Campaigns & Elections.

The goals for the new platform are modest. Brandon said that the Independent Center wants to find candidates to run in just a handful of congressional districts this year. If even two of those candidates get elected, he said, it would be a success. 

But, Brandon and his colleagues argue, there’s real potential for new independent candidates. Polling released by Gallup last month found that 45 percent of U.S. voters identify as political independents – a new high from the 43 percent measured in 2014, 2023 and 2024. 

Prior to 2011, the percentage of Americans who identified as political independents never surpassed 40 percent, according to Gallup polling.

In its search for would-be candidates, the Independent Center is relying on AI to identify key issues that resonate with independent voters and pin down districts that could potentially come into play for an independent candidate with the right messaging and outreach strategy.

Key to the effort is finding the right kind of independent candidate, said Brett Loyd, the Independent Center’s polling and research specialist. He acknowledged that some independents are on the further ends of the ideological spectrum – “think Bernie Sanders, for example,” he said. 

“That’s not necessarily where we’re honing our intelligence,” Loyd said. “We’re honing it in the middle.” 

The group’s leaders said they’re hoping to have their slate of candidates and districts pinned down by the end of February. The idea is to use the Independent Center’s AI platform as a kind of strategic advisor for those campaigns. The platform utilizes a chat interface that can provide candidates real-time insights into voter sentiment, generate plans for reaching low-turnout independent voters and draft talking points tailored to voters in a given district.

Vance Reavie, the Independent Center’s tech and strategy specialist and the CEO of tech startup Junction AI, said that the platform is tailored to the Independent Center’s research on non-party-affiliated voters. Those voters, he said, largely meet important criteria: they’re ideologically consistent, united on priorities, reachable in large numbers, strategically valuable and open to persuasion.

“What we’re seeing in the data is independents have this reputation of being all over the place, ideologically,” Reavie said. “But through the polling and analysis work we’ve done, we found that the vast majority of independents do sit largely in the center.”

“They absolutely reject being partisan,” Reavie said. “That’s been one thing that defines them more than anything else.”