Centrist Independent Voter has endorsed Senator Chris Coons in Delaware’s September 15 Democratic primary for the United States Senate.
Coons has built the kind of record we would like to see more often in Congress: serious about American leadership abroad, willing to work across party lines and prepared to confront difficult fiscal and institutional questions rather than simply repeat his party’s preferred talking points.
He has been a strong supporter of Ukraine and America’s alliances, while supporting Israel’s security without treating support for Israel as an endorsement of every decision made by its government. He has also joined bipartisan efforts to address Social Security’s long-term finances and has opposed tariffs that raise costs for American consumers and businesses.
On immigration, Coons combines support for secure borders and enforcement with comprehensive reform and due-process protections. That approach is much closer to Centrist Independent Voter’s view than treating enforcement and humane immigration policy as opposing choices.
Coons faces three Democratic challengers, but none has made a persuasive case for replacing an experienced senator with his record of bipartisan and institutionally serious governing.
Centrist Independent Voter has endorsed Sam Mead in Wyoming’s August 18 Republican primary for the United States Senate.
Mead is challenging Representative Harriet Hageman, who entered Congress after defeating Liz Cheney in 2022. There is a certain symmetry to the race: Cheney delivered her concession speech that year from the Mead family ranch.
But our endorsement is not about relitigating that election.
It is about whether Republican senators should exercise independent judgment or regard loyalty to Donald Trump as part of their job description.
Mead has said senators should judge presidential nominees on competence, character and ethics rather than partisan loyalty. He has defended Congress’s constitutional authority over war, criticized deficit spending, supported secure borders combined with legal immigration reform, and opposed wholesale disposal of Wyoming’s public lands.
We have reservations. Mead needs to provide much more detail on Ukraine, NATO, China and federal fiscal policy.
But he offers something increasingly scarce in Republican politics: a willingness to tell a president of his own party no.
Four years after Hageman defeated Cheney, Wyoming Republicans have an opportunity to send a different kind of conservative to Washington.
CIVPAC has endorsed former Governor Mark Sanford in South Carolina’s August 11 special Republican primary for the United States Senate.
Sanford is not a conventional centrist, and CIVPAC has important disagreements with him—particularly on abortion. But he offers qualities that have become increasingly rare in the Republican Party: genuine concern about federal debt, support for competitive markets and free trade, respect for constitutional limits and demonstrated independence from Donald Trump.
Sanford opposed Trump’s tariffs, challenged the party’s growing reliance on presidential loyalty and lost his congressional seat after publicly criticizing Trump. His record gives us reason to believe that he would approach the Senate as a member of an independent branch of government rather than as an automatic vote for the president.
He has made serious personal and political mistakes. South Carolina voters have previously considered those failures and returned him to public office. We believe his experience, fiscal seriousness and political courage make him the strongest candidate in the Republican field.
A couple of days ago, I heard Felix Frisch discuss Promise to America with Elie Honig on SiriusXM. I came away thinking that we had found an organization that belongs on CIVPAC’s list of centrist resources.
Promise to America is an effort to give moderate Democrats something they have often lacked: a simple, affirmative statement of what they believe. It was developed by a group of young political organizers working with Democratic Representatives Tom Suozzi of New York and Adam Gray of California—the only two Democrats who captured Republican-held House districts won by Donald Trump in 2024.
The organization is directed by Felix Frisch, the 20-year-old son of former Colorado congressional candidate Adam Frisch. Felix worked on his father’s two campaigns and says he drove more than 50,000 miles through western and southern Colorado. That experience appears to have taught him something national political organizations sometimes forget: candidates must listen to the voters they need to persuade, not merely repeat the views of the activists.
Promise to America asks Democratic candidates and elected officials to embrace six broad principles:
Growth, competition and broadly shared prosperity
Safety, security and human dignity
Fiscal discipline
Government that works
Free speech, respect and common purpose
Confident patriotism and national renewal
The pledge summarizes those principles in unusually direct language:
“We are capitalist, not socialist.”
“We want safety, not lawlessness.”
“We are responsible, not reckless.”
“We believe government should solve problems, not create them.”
“We are mainstream, not extreme.”
“We are proud, not ashamed of America.”
CIVPAC agrees with all six statements.
That does not mean that slogans are a substitute for policy. Saying that government should be fiscally responsible is easier than identifying which programs should be reduced, which taxes should be increased or which promises should be reconsidered. Supporting secure borders does not by itself tell us what a workable immigration system would look like. Supporting capitalism does not relieve government of the responsibility to preserve competition, protect opportunity and address genuine market failures.
But political organizations need both policies and an identity. Voters want to know not only what a candidate proposes to do, but also what kind of person—or party—they are being asked to trust.
Promise to America offers a recognizable identity: economically pragmatic, socially tolerant, patriotic, serious about public safety, supportive of effective government and willing to persuade people who do not already agree.
That is a useful answer to the impression that Democrats must choose between offering no clear governing philosophy and adopting the philosophy of the democratic socialist left.
The pledge’s emphasis on persuasion may be especially important. American elections are not won by assembling the purest possible collection of beliefs. They are won by building coalitions. That requires candidates to speak respectfully to voters who may disagree with them on abortion, guns, immigration, taxes, policing, climate policy or cultural questions.
A political party that treats disagreement as evidence of moral failure will steadily shrink the number of people it can represent.
The Democratic Party needs people who understand that defeating MAGA politics requires winning voters outside safely Democratic cities and districts. The party cannot build a durable national majority by telling culturally moderate, working-class, rural and suburban voters that they must accept every position favored by the progressive left.
Centrists should not limit themselves to warning Democrats about what they must reject. They need to describe what they are for.
Promise to America has made a promising start.
Its principles do not constitute a complete governing program, but they describe a political temperament that is badly needed: confident without being arrogant, patriotic without being uncritical, market-oriented without being indifferent, and moderate without being timid.
We are therefore adding Promise to America to CIVPAC’s list of centrist organizations. We hope its candidates and supporters will move beyond a pledge to develop specific, credible policies. It took CIVPAC years to develop our current portfolio of centrist public policies. Promise to America has existed for only a few weeks.
We also hope Democratic leaders will listen to people such as Tom Suozzi and Adam Gray, who have demonstrated that they can win voters in places where elections are genuinely contested.
And we will be watching Felix Frisch. It is encouraging to hear a young political leader speak about persuasion, pluralism and coalition-building with a maturity that is often missing from American politics.
