The Democrats’ Secret Weapon In Red States? Not Running At All.

As Democrats see President Donald Trump’s popularity sink and their chances for a wave election rise in certain Republican-leaning states, they’re relying on an unusual strategy: Get their own candidates to drop out.

The strategy follows previous efforts by Democrats to clear the field for independent candidates to run against Republicans in states where the national party brand has become an albatross around their candidates’ necks. And so far, Democratic candidates are getting out of the way in most states — Senate candidates in Nebraska, Idaho and South Dakota, as well as a House candidate in Alaska, have all dropped their bids in favor of independents.

The main exception is in Montana, where GOP Sen. Steve Daines’ last-minute decision not to run for reelection presents an enticing target. So Democratic leaders are hoping their nominee, Alani Bankhead, will also drop out to make way for Seth Bodnar, the former University of Montana president running as an independent.

“It’s kind of a shit show right now,” said former Sen. Jon Tester, who lost reelection in 2024 and is the last Democrat to hold statewide office in Montana.

Tester is backing Bodnar and has called on Bankhead, an Air Force veteran with little political experience, to withdraw from the race, although he said that he isn’t doing anything behind the scenes to pressure her ahead of the Aug. 10 filing deadline, when she still has a chance to remove her name from the ballot.

But there is an ongoing push to get Bankhead to exit the race, even though she has declared that she will “never drop out” and has said Bodnar should do so instead.

Bodnar and Bankhead have met in recent days to no avail, according to local media reports. An outside group called Montana Freedom PAC spent more than $1 million on ads and text messages to boost Bodnar and attack Bankhead in July, and is reportedly now distributing lawn signs explicitly calling on Bankhead to withdraw. The state’s chapter of the Service Employees International Union and the Montana Federation of Public Employees, both reliable backers of Democrats, endorsed Bodnar in August.

Lawyers both in the state and from the national Democratic Party law firm Elias Group have presented legal opinions that would allow the party to not replace Bankhead were she to withdraw.

A flurry of polls from Contours, Inc., an organization backing independent candidates including Bodnar, have shown Bodnar leading GOP candidate Kurt Alme in a head-to-head match-up, while Alme easily wins if Bankhead stays in and splits the vote. Other polls have shown Bodnar doing significantly better than Bankhead in head-to-head match-ups with Alme. (Republicans, who would like to keep both candidates in the race, are touting an internal memo from Senate Leadership Fund, the chief super PAC for Senate Republicans, claiming that Bankhead is a stronger candidate than Bodnar.)

“The independent’s got a shot just like in a lot of other states if the Democrat gets out,” Tester said. “Alani Bankhead has lived in the state a quick minute. She has no shot.”

“Alani Bankhead is the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, and she is staying in this race through November,” Jeri Bucy, director of strategic communications for the Bankhead campaign, said in a statement. “Montana Democrats vetted Alani and chose her in the primary. Seth Bodnar has never been on a ballot or vetted by a single voter. Alani has been direct that the way to beat Kurt Alme is to unite behind the nominee Montanans chose. That’s where our focus is.”

The states where Democrats are looking to back independent candidates are ripe for this particular strategy, according to a study by the political data site Split Ticket. They all have extremely high populations of white people, relatively low populations of evangelicals and high support for Republican candidates. This combination of factors makes an independent candidate viable because they can appeal to voters who wouldn’t vote for a Democrat (white voters) but who aren’t constrained by extreme partisanship (evangelical voters) — all without worrying about alienating Democrats who view their partisanship as part of their personal identity (non-white voters).

And although Montana remains a sore spot, the pressure campaigns have been successful in other states that have not favored Democrats in recent years.

In Nebraska, Democratic Senate nominee Cindy Burbank ended her campaign on July 18 to make way for independent Dan Osborn, a former union leader and Navy veteran who ran a close race against Republican Sen. Deb Fischer in 2024 and is now running against GOP Sen. Pete Ricketts.

Idaho Democratic Senate candidate David Roth ended his bid on July 28, citing a desire to focus his “time and energy on helping Democrats win up and down the ballot and in communities across Idaho.” That leaves former state legislator and Army veteran Todd Achilles, who previously held office as a Democrat but is now running as an independent, as the lone challenger to Republican Sen. Jim Risch.

Roth faced pressure from state Democrats to drop out. Former Democratic Rep. Larry LaRocco wrote op-eds calling for his withdrawal, and the Ada County Democrats threatened to endorse Achilles if Roth could not show that he could raise sufficient funds to compete.

In South Dakota, Democratic Senate nominee Julian Beaudion dropped out on Aug. 4 to clear the path for independent Brian Bengs, a Navy veteran who ran as a Democrat in 2022. Local and national Democrats had been pushing hard for Beaudion to drop his campaign against Republican Sen. Mike Rounds.

Prior to Beaudion’s departure, he faced calls from Steve Hildebrand, a former top aide to ex-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, one of the last Democrats elected statewide in South Dakota, to withdraw and let Bengs run one-on-one against Rounds.

“Let’s be adults. Let’s pretend like we actually care about democracy and not about a candidate. So shut down South Dakota,” Hildebrand said about Beaudion. “Go raise national money, Brian Bengs, and beat the hell out of Rounds using his own votes, and maybe you got a shot. That’s the path to victory in my mind. If you don’t wanna do that, then let’s all go home.”

Alaska Democratic House candidate Matt Schultz dropped his challenge to GOP Rep. Nick Begich on July 17 and endorsed independent Bill Hill, a commercial fisherman and retired school superintendent.

Not all Democrats are fans of pushing out their own candidates, but there is a strong case for it — especially in certain states. It has been more than a decade since a Democrat held a Senate seat in either Nebraska or South Dakota. Montana has gone from having two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor in 2014 to being a solidly Republican state where Democrats struggle at the statewide level. Meanwhile, the last Democrat to represent Idaho in the Senate was Frank Church, who lost his reelection bid in 1980.

But in Nebraska, Osborn came within 6 percentage points of the incumbent, Fischer, in 2024. That margin outpaced Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris by 15 points in the state — the highest differential by any candidate challenging a Republican.

This follows a pattern of independents gaining some ground where Democrats stand down. In Utah, former Republican Trump critic Evan McMullin ran for Senate as an independent in deep-red Utah in 2022 and lost to GOP Sen. Mike Lee by just 10 points. Trump won Utah by 20 points in 2020. In Kansas, where no Democrat has won a Senate race since Herbert Hoover was president, independent Greg Orman lost to then-Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican, by 11 points in 2014, far outpacing President Barack Obama’s 22-point loss to Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election in the state.

And then there’s Alaska, where the state Democratic Party has fully embraced aligning with independent candidates to win elections. This strategy not only helped elect Republican-turned-independent Bill Walker as governor in 2014, but it has led Democrats to form a coalition of independents and moderate Republicans to control both chambers of the state legislature.

Democrats backing independents may not lead to victories in all — or any — of these races. But it could force Republicans to spend money in states that they otherwise wouldn’t bother with, draining their resources in more purple states with tighter races.