United Independents, the organization behind the Independent National Convention, announced on Friday that national and regional leaders from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s former independent presidential campaign will join its effort to elect a slate of independent congressional candidates in 2026.
“We’re thrilled to announce that leaders from across the U.S. independent political sector, including many national and regional leaders from Team Kennedy, are joining Operation Phoenix,” the organization stated in an email briefing. However, it did not identify specific individuals from the campaign.
United Independents first introduced its Operation Phoenix initiative last week during the first of a new series of weekly briefings. The organization explained that it intends to collaborate with established third parties—specifically referencing the Libertarian, Green, and Forward parties—to field a unified slate of independent congressional candidates. The ultimate aim is to elect enough independents to form the first independent caucus in the U.S. Congress.
The group also stated that its broader goal is to ensure no single party ever holds a majority again. United Independents added this week that over the next six months, it will actively prepare for the initiative, with plans to launch its 18-month campaign in the third quarter of 2025.
In addition to the update on Operation Phoenix, the organization also released details of its upcoming membership program, which it said is set to launch in January. Designed to strengthen the broader independent movement, the program will offer educational resources, live community calls, leadership training, moderated discussions, and what it describes as “income-earning opportunities.”
They wouldn’t have to unite around anything more than the goal of getting non-uniparty candidates into office.
Since the party can’t field multiple candidates for the same race in the general election, the candidates the party puts forward for different races could run on completely incompatible and opposed platforms from one another.
For example, they could field a radical isolationist anarchist in one congressional district and run a raging marxist interventionist in the adjacent district of the same state. All they’d be united about is busting the duopoly and getting more disparate voices into congress, as in a multiparty parliamentary system.
It is really not possible for independents to unite because independents can hold any point of view/ideology so there is nothing for them to unite around. Since independents can stand for anything a group of independents really stand for nothing as a group.
@Andy
Presumably the idea is to defeat the stupid winner-takes-all system protecting the duopoly of power: Get independents into congress by uniting, then afterwards let them vote however they want, i.e. create something more akin to an actual multiparty system, as opposed to the US uniparty circus, by smuggling in multiple third parties’ representatives under the guise of a single joint list.
The problem is that if you are working with the Green Party and the Forward Party, but not with the Constitution Party or the American Independent Party, then that already reveals an inherently leftist bias, which suggests that the people you will field from the Libertarian Party and RFK’s campaign will also be the leftist ones. And then it’s curtains as far as being a big tent block of independents is concerned.
Independent in politics means a person who is not part of a political party Independent is not an ideology. Independents can hold any political view. So the concept of united independents strikes me as pretty stupid. Independents are not united because independent is not an ideology. Independents by their nature are not united.