What an Idaho Senate Race Reveals About the Future of Independent Politics

Every cycle we hear that Americans are exhausted by the two party system. Most of the time it stays an abstraction. Then occasionally a race comes along that turns the abstraction into a real test. Idaho's 2026 U.S. Senate race is shaping up to be one of those tests.

On the latest episode of Purple Political Breakdown, I spoke with Todd Achilles, an independent candidate challenging a three-term incumbent. His background is not the usual political resume: active duty Army tank commander in the 1990s, two decades in the technology sector at large companies, then a stint in the Idaho House before he left the parties to run as an independent. What makes the conversation worth having is not his odds, which by any honest measure are long. It is the argument underneath his campaign.

Todd's central claim is that the dysfunction in Congress is structural. In his telling, when one party holds the White House, that party's members in Congress become cheerleaders rather than checks, and the constitutional design of separated powers quietly stops working. He frames the country's deepest fault line as top versus bottom rather than left versus right. Whether you find that persuasive or not, it is a diagnosis worth engaging seriously, because it cuts across the usual partisan script.

Some of the most useful moments were the specific ones. He described how non-compete agreements, once reserved for executives, now bind low wage workers and limit their ability to walk across the street for a better job. He explained algorithmic pricing in rental housing, where large property managers feed confidential data to a third party pricing service and receive coordinated recommendations to raise rents, a practice he argues functions as collusion even though the landlords never speak directly. He connected corporate share buybacks to stagnant wages with a roadside story about a convenience store manager earning well below a livable wage while her employer returned a billion dollars to shareholders. These are concrete policy mechanics, and they travel well beyond Idaho.

We also covered where he draws lines. He defends the filibuster on the grounds that eliminating it would let a small share of the population legislate for everyone, while also arguing it should be reformed back into a physical, present, talking process rather than a remote procedural hold. He supports guardrails on AI and worker power through unions, and he wants antitrust laws enforced and modernized. On each, he frames his position in terms of individual liberty and fair markets, language designed to reach across the aisle in a deep red state.

The reason I host these conversations is simple. Civic life improves when voters can hear candidates think out loud, get pushed on their reasoning, and reveal whether they actually have positions or only talking points. You do not have to agree with Todd Achilles to benefit from hearing an independent make his case in full. That is the purple way: substance over slogans, and room for you to decide.

Listen to the full conversation here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-an-independent-actually-win-a-senate-seat-in/id1626987640?i=1000772957935