By Nathan Gotsch

It’s not every day you share political info with a longtime party insider—in this case, a former Indiana Republican State Party chair—that genuinely shocks them. But that’s exactly what I experienced earlier this year.

Before our conversation, I’d been combing through the 2023 and 2024 Indiana election results, searching for anything that might suggest a path to restoring competitive general elections in our state. As I scrolled through the data, something caught my eye: A surprising number of independent candidates had run for partisan office in Indiana the past two years.

That caught my attention because, unlike most people, I knew how challenging it was to run as an independent here. I’d done so myself, running for Congress in northeast Indiana in 2022, when I learned firsthand the structural barriers independents face.

Chief among them is a burdensome signature requirement to get on the ballot, which gets worse as the size of the office increases. In my case, I had to collect nearly 5,000 signatures from registered voters in my district (IN-3); the Republican and Democratic candidates didn’t need any. (An independent run for statewide office requires 36,943 signatures.)

Aware that my electoral history as an independent might be causing me to read too much into the numbers, I reached out to that former Republican state chair to see how many independents running across the state in 2023 and 2024 would signal something important to him.

“Well, if it was 50, that would be surprising,” he told me.

“It’s 244,” I said.

He paused. “Wow. OK. How many of them won?”

It was the right question. As I’d discovered myself, there’s a big difference between getting on the ballot and getting elected, especially because Indiana is one of six states that still has straight-ticket voting. The year I ran, 48% of voters in Allen County—where half the district’s population resides—voted straight ticket and didn’t even see my name on the ballot.

“What percentage of those 244 independents do you think won?” I asked him.

His guess: 5%.

“It was 52%,” I replied.

The shock on his face confirmed my initial impression: This was a big deal.

What makes these results even more striking is that so few people know about them, given that independents have no statewide communications team to package their wins and share them with the public.

And those structural barriers I mentioned—and lack of institutional support—have relegated their wins to the lower half of the ballot: mayors, city and town council members, and clerk-treasurers. Important offices, to be sure, just not the kind that typically make headlines.

But independents have been running for countywide, state legislative and congressional seats, too. And despite losing, many have been coming closer than you’d expect. Of those who lost in 2023 and 2024, nearly a third garnered at least 30% of the vote. That’s far above spoiler territory and suggests they might’ve won with a little help.

To provide it, a group of Hoosiers and I have launched a new project called Independent Indiana. Our mission is to make sure people across the state know that running for office as an independent is more viable than they think. We plan to support those who step forward and study how to help them succeed in higher-level races.

If, like so many, you’ve grown disillusioned by the state of our politics, I hope you’ll consider joining us. Like a certain former state Republican chair, what you discover along the way might shock you—and hopefully inspire you, too.•

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Nathan Gotsch is the executive director of Independent Indiana.