Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework" (Springer, 2014), has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
There is something very healthy as well as very threatening about the increasing number of independent candidates for president, notably Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein. West and Stein are on the radical left-wing, and Kennedy is an eccentric centrist.
Our political system is so troubled that new perspectives are definitely needed. The problem is that too many independents running for president may well throw the entire presidential election into chaos and leave no one with 270 electoral votes. Regardless of your politics, it would not be good for the country if the 2024 presidential election gets decided by the U.S. House of Representatives, where a Republican would win since the Republicans will have the authority to make the choice.
What our country needs even more than independents running for president is independents running for the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House. Moreover, we need to transition from the hopeless goal of bipartisanship to the catalyzing goal of tripartisanship. Indeed, Washington politics needs a tripartisan revolution.
Charles Wheelan made the case in The Centrist Manifesto that five or six centrist Senators who were members of a centrist political party would have enormous leverage on Capitol Hill. He called his strategy the "Fulcrum Strategy." He is correct, but Third Parties paint a target on their back and are therefore always going to run dark horse candidates. Independents, on the other hand, whatever their ideology, can get elected one at a time if they are deft, thoughtful, and well-funded. Some can even get elected if they are not well-funded. The tripartisan ideal does not seek to impose a Third Party vision on the country, left-wing, right-wing or centrist. Rather, it seeks a creative synthesis of concepts and values taken from the Democrats, the Republicans, and a diverse group of independents.
The energy and diversity we are seeing at the level of presidential politics is encouraging but it is also misdirected. Theoretically, even if one of the independents won the race for the presidency there would still be major limitations on what he or she could accomplish -- certainly in domestic politics -- if the Congress remained almost entirely in the hands of the Democrats and the Republicans.
The ideal scenario over the next six to eight years is for about three more independents to be elected to the Senate (there are three now, Senators King, Sinema and Sanders), 10 to 15 independents to be elected to the House, and an independent to be elected to the presidency. These independents would also all rally around the ideal of tripartisanship. Their commitment to the tripartisanship ideal would compel the Democrats and Republicans to work with this third force in American politics to resolve our most pressing policy issues, including gun safety, entitlement reform, immigration, paid leave and child care, health care, the national debt, energy, and foreign policy. These independents, who would not represent the same ideological perspective, would nevertheless frequently vote together, maybe four out of six in the Senate, in order to help the majority party get to 60 votes on major policy bills in order to preserve their club, their leverage, and their chances of reelection.
To be sure, electoral reform is critically important for a tripartisanship revolution to come about, notably Open Primaries, ranked choice voting, and nonpartisan voting districts. There are without doubt structural factors that continue to impede the ability for independents to both run for office and vote in primary elections. At the same time, it is worth pointing out that doubling or tripling turnout in primaries -- from 20% to 40% or 60% -- would also diminish the power of the base in both major parties.
Talk of a Joe Manchin campaign for president has boomed now that he has declared that he will not run for reelection in 2024. Although he might be a candidate to run on a centrist No Labels ticket, he should also consider running as an independent who is motivated both by his centrist values and the tripartisan ideal.
Demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court as justices hear oral arguments on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
Luz Angela Nuñez with her daughter Aisha Quershi Nuñez at their home in College Point, Queens. Photo: Mia Anzalone for Documented.
Kimberly Alvarez, 25, with her daughter Evangeline and her husband John Alvarez in Medellin, Colombia. Photo courtesy of Kimberly Alvarez.Alvarez arrived in New York City in February 2024 with her husband John Alvarez as asylum seekers from Venezuela. In April 2025, Alvarez found out she was pregnant with her first child, a baby girl. Her first reaction, she said, was fear.“How am I going to keep her alive?” she said. “That’s what I was thinking. ‘How am I going to be able to take care of her?’”At the beginning of Alvarez’s pregnancy, she said she was aware of the immigration enforcement occurring around the country, but vowed not to let it deter her from showing up to her doctor’s appointments.“When you went out, you were always on alert because you didn’t know if [ICE] might be around. I never saw anything suspicious,” Alvarez said. “But of course, you feel scared.”In October, when Alvarez was six months pregnant, her husband was detained by ICE agents at 26 Federal Plaza. When the immediate shock wore off, she obsessively checked the Online Detainee Locator System to find out where her husband went. A day later, she discovered that he was being kept at Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey. Alvarez quickly set up an account to pay for phone calls, and every two days, she would pay about $10 for a one-hour call, updating her husband about the baby, her appointments and how she was doing.“Crying was the only way for me to release the tension,” said Alvarez, who worried that her lack of sleep and bad diet were impacting her baby. “Crying was the only way for me to release the tension.”—Kimberly AlvarezThat tension built up day by day, week by week following her husband’s arrest. Alvarez had stopped her work as a cleaner in the neighborhood’s synagogues two weeks before her husband’s detention because of her pregnancy. The plan, she said, was to rely solely on his income as a maintenance worker for “the food, the rent, everything.” Left with few choices, Kimberley had to rely on her mother’s income as a cleaner. The older woman had moved to New York from North Carolina to assist with Alvarez’s pregnancy. “I feel like I’m supposed to help my mom, not the other way around,” Alvarez said. “I felt powerless because I couldn’t do anything.”On Dec. 9, Alvarez gave birth to a daughter, Evangeline. While her baby was healthy, Alvarez’s anxieties did not go away. While she returned to cleaning synagogues a few months after Evangeline’s birth to help make ends meet, Alvarez and her daughter rarely left home. Alvarez said she felt paralyzed, getting frequent alerts from a neighborhood WhatsApp group when ICE was spotted nearby. One day, she said, ICE arrested her friend’s husband in Sunset Park, in an area where she would sometimes take Evangeline for walks.“I’m so afraid that I’ll go out and run into one of them and that they’ll take her away from me,” Alvarez said. “That’s my biggest fear, that someone will take her away from me and I won’t know where my daughter is.”In March, her husband decided to voluntarily remove himself from the United States and move back to Colombia, where he is originally from. It was a family decision, but it was not a happy one — hiring immigration lawyers was too expensive, Alvarez said, adding that staying in the U.S. felt too uncertain. 
