Why Don’t More Independents Run in Big Cities?

America is famously divided into quasi one-party-controlled states with a handful of genuinely competitive places where the two parties have reasonable chances of winning statewide or other local elections. This leads to an interesting puzzle: If independent candidacies can emerge effectively in deeply Republican states, why aren’t we seeing something parallel occurring in deeply Democratic cities?

For context, Republicans currently hold a trifecta, meaning control of the governorship and majorities in both chambers of the legislature, in 23 states (AL, AR, FL, GA, ID, IN, IA, LA, MS, MO, MT, NE, NH, ND, OH, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, WV, WY). Democrats hold a trifecta in 16 states (CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NJ, NM, NY, OR, RI, VA, and WA), and 11 others (AK, AZ, KS, KY, MI, MN, NV, NC, PA, VT, and WI) have some division of power between the two.

In the states where one party completely dominates the other, you’re hard-pressed to find any viable opposition. Why? Because the Democrats are so electorally weak and unpopular in deep-red states that they are incapable of serving as an alternative landing spot for dissatisfied voters, while Republicans are in the same losing position in relation to voters in dark-blue redoubts.

It’s not as if all voters living within these states are card-carrying, straight-ticket Democrats or Republicans, however. With the rise of negative polarization and unitary party control in so many places, we’re beginning to see more voters registering as unaffiliated voters and more independent candidates running as alternatives to entrenched incumbents in one-party environments.

Independent candidacies are more prominent this cycle in several red-leaning states where Democrats are about as appetizing as wet bread. The New York Times recently profiled a few of these candidates in both statewide and congressional elections, including Todd Achilles in Idaho and Seth Bodnar in Montana, both running for the U.S. Senate:

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.

Some of these independents are long shots, none of them are favored, but they all figure they are better off than a Democrat would be.

These developments are leading to many difficult conversations and decisions among state Democrats, most notably in Nebraska and South Dakota, where party leaders are standing down and not running candidates to increase the chances that one of these independents might successfully capture the anti-incumbent vote. In Idaho, meanwhile, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terri Pickens has said she believes an independent helps her case by drawing moderate Republicans, leaving her to build a coalition of “Democrats, independents, and Republican women.”

Whether independent candidacies and weak opposition parties can overcome severely lopsided environments to achieve regular victories remains to be seen. But the underlying logic is sound: when the opposition party is frail and unpopular, independent candidates offer discontented voters a genuine alternative to the ruling party.

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The question then arises: why don’t independents and Republicans figure out a similar strategy to pursue in the big cities of America, most of which are controlled by Democrats?

As of September 2026, 67 of the largest 100 cities are run by Democratic mayors compared to 21 run by Republicans, and the remaining ones are run by either a libertarian (1), an independent (3), a nonpartisan (6), an unaffiliated (1), or an unknown partisan (1) mayor. Democrats have controlled the mayoralties in at least 61 of the biggest cities for the last ten years, according to Ballotpedia.

The days of famous moderate or pragmatic Republican mayors like Richard Riordan in L.A., Fiorello LaGuardia, Rudy Giuliani, and Michael Bloomberg in New York, and Richard Lugar in Indianapolis are long gone. It’s extremely difficult to see Republicans, now closely identified with Donald Trump and his agenda, competing regularly in large metropolitan areas with far more Democratic voters than Republicans and electorates that are more economically and culturally progressive than in the past.

But clearly there are plenty of urban voters—dissident Democrats, independents, and Republicans—who don’t like the leftist shift in their city and would conceivably vote for some alternative that could possibly win. This will almost certainly mean a real independent candidate—not a losing primary candidate running as an independent like former governor Andrew Cuomo, who ran alongside Republican Curtis Sliwa against Zohran Mamdani in the 2025 NYC mayoral election.

Can independents and Republicans get their act together to mount serious challenges to Democratic hegemony in places like Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, L.A., Seattle, or San Francisco? Four of these six cities have had continuous Democratic mayoral control for more than half a century. So the institutional and political obstacles are formidable. Yet conditions can change fairly rapidly with the right candidates and organizational effort.

Republicans, of course, could adjust themselves to be less dependent on Trump and less hostile to urban America more generally.

Barring that shift in tenor and tone, Republicans, like Democrats in many deep-red states, could at least get out of the way and let genuinely independent candidates rally frustrated voters in big cities around practical concerns such as new jobs and economic development, more efficient public services, less corruption, cleaner streets and parks, better transportation, lower property taxes, less city debt, reduced crime and homelessness, and improved schools.

America’s big cities are critical to the nation’s success, and urban residents deserve effective government and better representation. This first requires real political competition—and independents could provide an alternative for disappointed voters who don’t view either the Democrats in power or the opposition Republicans as acceptable choices.