Independent Voter Podcast
Tired of being told what to think by partisan gatekeepers? So are we. The Independent Voter Podcast brings you conversations that challenge the two-party echo chamber and reject the false binaries dominating today’s political narratives. We focus on two things: (1) Election reforms that increase real competition and voter choice, and (2) Policy issues that defy the black-and-white frameworks set by national party agendas. We’ve been called everything: liberals, undercover Republicans, progressives, socialists, libertarians—even anarchists. And depending on the article, they’re all true. We are open to any voice that follows our simple etiquette. If you believe political independence is a mindset, not a middle ground, you’re in the right place. This the Independent Voter Podcast..
Episodes
Six days before the consequential midterm races and no one knows what will happen. Except us. We make our predictions on Senate races in Texas, Michigan, Maine, and Alaska, and compare our picks to the Polymarket odds.
Texas gets a deep look at James Talarico vs. Ken Paxton, including Talarico’s play for independent voters that could finally turn Texas blue, in spite of Republican campaign ads urging voters to stick to their ...
Open Primaries founder John Opdycke joins Chad Peace and Cara McCormick for a wide-ranging, no-bs conversation on where the reform movement actually stands, starting with Pennsylvania's open primary fight and then asking the question: are presidential primaries even elections in the first place?
John Opdycke breaks down why 48% of Americans now identify as independent and still have no real seat at the table, then walks through Pen...
California’s elections are right around the corner, and IVP's own polling proves that independents are the voters with the power to control the outcome. Chad, Cara, and Ethan dig into the data behind Prop 39's voter ID fight and why it's not the fair contest it looks like on paper.
The crew opens by walking through why IVP's statewide surveys are catching things the big outlets miss, then puts that polling power to work on Ca...
A Trump rally clip has Los Angeles and San Diego in the crosshairs, and the most shocking part is that the crowd was cheering. Cara, Shawn, and Ethan break down what he actually said, what got cut from the viral version, and why both sides keep weaponizing clips like this to deepen the divide.
The hosts open with the Iran bombing comment controversy, unpacking the full context (it came during a riff on oil prices) and whether the m...
Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Independent Veterans of America and now the face of a growing independent-veteran movement, just became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against New York State's closed primary system, and he's joined by his attorney (and IVP host) Chad Peace to explain why.
Rieckhoff tells the personal story that pushed him into this fight: walking his kids to their New York City public school on primary day and having to...
Trump and Zohran Mamdani just had round two at Gracie Mansion, all smiles and charm. The IVP crew says the real story isn't the photo op, it's the primary system that manufactured two "ideological extremes" who now have to govern together.
Chad, Cara, Shawn, and Ethan open by unpacking why Trump and Mamdani's rhetoric is scorched-earth in public but strangely cordial in person, and connect it to Katherine Gehl's recent argument abo...
California's top-two primary was built for exactly this moment: DSA-backed Democrats facing off against the party's moderate wing in front of the entire electorate, not just a partisan base. The man who wrote that law, former state senator Steve Peace, joins Cara McCormick to break down whether his system is working the way he designed it.
Steve Peace, author of California's top-two primary, walks through the wave of Democrat-on-De...
The fight over President Trump’s mail-in voting rule continues to escalate: a whistleblower leak says just one bad envelope could get an entire batch of mail ballots sent back, threatening to derail elections in states that already have ballots prepared for the midterms.
Chad, Shawn, and Ethan dig into the real mechanics of the USPS rule now tied up in its third round of injunctions, from the barcode and voter-list requiremen...
When the polls said two Republicans might take the top two spots, California Democratic Party leadership went to work getting Democrats out of the governor's race. Antonio Villaraigosa was one of them. He said no - and he says the whole thing left a black mark on the party.
The first Latino mayor of Los Angeles, former Speaker of the California Assembly, and recent candidate for governor sits down with the Independent Voter Podcast...
President Trump just handed the Postal Service veto power over your mail-in ballot, and Chad and Cara can't agree on whether that's chaos, overreach, or both. This episode, the crew untangles what the USPS's new ballot rule actually does, why the Supreme Court's ruling this week is more limited than the headlines suggest, and why Cara thinks Republicans are abandoning their own Tenth Amendment principles to get it.
From there, the ...
Anne Dunsmore has been in the room for nearly 50 years of American politics, and it all started because she lost a bet in a D.C. bar.
She sits down with Chad Peace and Cara McCormick to tell her story: working the floor with James Baker and Margaret Tutwiler on George H.W. Bush's 1980 campaign, turning around Pete Wilson's reelection from what she calls an "Exxon Valdez" moment, and raising $1.2 billion alongside Michael Ov...
IVP's own producer just became a U.S. citizen, and she's sitting down with Chad and Cara to talk about what it actually took, and what it felt like the moment she finally got to register to vote.
Lina Alvarez walks Chad and Cara through her path from a marriage-based green card to studying all 128 U.S. civics questions to passing her citizenship test this month, including the multi-year "removal of conditions" process most American...
Rick Bennett climbed to the top of Maine's Republican Party - President of the Senate - and now he's running for governor without a party at all. His reasoning is blunt: the parties themselves are a major reason government stopped working.
Chad and Cara sit down with the independent candidate for Governor of Maine to talk about why a lifelong Republican with the credentials to play the party game decided to walk away from it. Ri...
Elon Musk just quietly put $1.5 million behind a network aimed at killing Alaska's top-four open primary. The kicker: the same measure would repeal the transparency law that let anyone find out he paid for it.
Then the crew digs into Musk's money in Alaska: who's really behind the repeal, why MAGA wants Alaska's system gone, and why Chad argues closed primaries are voter suppression on a scale that dwarfs every voter ID fight in th...
Missouri voters showed up and shut down the legislature's attempt to gut citizen initiatives - and then, hours before polls closed, the Secretary of State went in front of a camera and declared their 300,000-signature people's veto unconstitutional anyway.
Cara McCormick, Ethan Handelman, and Shawn Griffiths break down what actually happened in Missouri: the legislature's repeat attempts to raise thresholds and choke off petition d...
A 27-year Army officer with three deployments looked at Congress and decided the problem wasn't which party was winning - it was that both of them were. So Jason Faler is running in Oregon's 6th with no letter behind his name.
Jason walks us through the road from four-generation Oregonian to combat tours in Baghdad and the Horn of Africa to healthcare administrator and professor - and the "frog in the boiling water" moment that ...
Everyone's calling Troy Jackson the establishment's safe replacement for Graham Platner. Here's the thing: Jackson has defied Democratic Party leadership more than Platner ever did - and he's got two decades of receipts.
Cara called the whole Maine shakeup before it happened - Platner out, Troy Jackson in - and she explains why she saw it coming and why she's genuinely excited about it. Chad and Cara break down what makes Jac...
Graham Platner won Maine's Democratic Senate primary with 71% of the vote and record turnout - and none of it matters anymore. Cara, Shawn, and Ethan break down how an obscure section of Maine election law lets 600 party delegates in Bangor erase the biggest primary win in state history.
After a barely-there vetting process collapsed under press scrutiny, Platner withdrew - and now the Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to ha...
The same young Latino voters who swung to Donald Trump in 2024 just handed New York to Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani - and no, they haven't changed their minds about anything. Strategist Mike Madrid explains why the fastest-growing bloc in American politics is walking ou...
We sit down with Jeremy, Senior VP of Open Primaries, to dig into a new IVP/Open Primaries poll of registered NYC Democrats - and what it reveals is wild. Jeremy lays out "the big lie" about open vs. closed primaries, why ~40% of NYC Democrats (and two out of three Latino Democrats) don't identify with the party they're registered in, and how a 10% turnout primary ends up deciding who actually runs the city. Then Jeremy lays out wh...
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