Bernie Sanders, Independent
Posted on 05/14/2026 5:34:01 PM PDT by Libloather
In my home state of Montana, former University of Montana President Seth Bodnar is running for the US Senate as an “independent.”
In Nebraska, the Democrat who won the party’s primary for US Senate this week plans to drop out of the general-election race and throw her support to “independent” Dan Osborn.
This rapidly developing trend in Republican-heavy states is not about independence: It’s about big-government policies being deliberately repackaged for voters who have grown skeptical of the liberal brand.
And the left is using party labels to mask what should be a genuine debate about policy direction.
In American politics, the core divide still revolves around the size, scope and role of government.
Conservatives generally argue for decentralization, lower taxes, lighter regulation, domestic energy production and more decision-making authority at the state, local, family and individual level.
Liberals generally place greater trust in federal programs, centralized regulation, subsidies, mandates and national administrative solutions to social and economic problems.
Those governing philosophies have not disappeared — but increasingly, the labels surrounding them are being manipulated.
In 2024, Nebraska offered an early example of the strategy.
Leftists there knew their party label had become a liability in the conservative state, so when Republican Sen. Deb Fischer came up for re-election, Democrats and aligned organizations effectively cleared the field for Dan Osborn, a labor organizer and US Navy veteran, to run as an independent candidate.
Osborn didn’t call himself a Democrat, but he still backed the same liberal policies and benefited from the same left-wing organizations and infrastructure that a Democratic Party candidate would have used.
He lost by 7 points, but outperformed expectations — so now he’s running again, this time against GOP Sen. Pete Ricketts.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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Bernie Sanders, Independent
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