Byrd offers Wyoming voters a substantially stronger commitment to constitutional government, congressional independence, and the principle that limits on executive power must apply regardless of which party controls the White House. Although we have reservations about his readiness for the office, we believe those concerns are outweighed by the importance of institutional integrity in this race.
We have just endorsed independent Bob Chew for the United States Senate from Colorado.
That creates an obvious complication.
Colorado will elect its senator by plurality: the candidate with the most votes wins, even without a majority. A vote for Chew therefore cannot later transfer to Democratic incumbent John Hickenlooper or Republican Mark Baisley if Chew finishes third.
Where is ranked-choice voting when you need it?
We have just seen the advantage of that system in Alaska. There, voters can rank their genuine first choice while still expressing a preference between the candidates most likely to survive to the final round. Colorado voters do not have that luxury. Colorado voters considered exactly this reform in 2024 and rejected it—and now the Chew race provides a concrete illustration of the problem the reform was intended to solve.
The spoiler problem is real. But the usual solution—never vote for an independent because the independent might spoil the election—creates its own circular logic. Independents cannot become viable because voters are afraid to support them, and voters are afraid to support them because they are not viable.
In Chew’s case, we also do not know whom he hurts more. He is a former Republican with fiscally conservative and market-oriented views that could attract moderate Republicans and independents uncomfortable with Baisley. But his support for Ukraine, opposition to Trump and institutional moderation could also attract Hickenlooper voters. There is not yet useful three-way polling that answers the question.
Colorado currently appears strongly Democratic, which reduces—but certainly does not eliminate—the risk of Chew aiding the election of Baisley. If ranked choice voting was available in Colorado our recommended ranking would be: 1) Chew, 2) Hickenlooper, and 3) Baisley.
We considered that risk and endorsed Chew anyway. An independent candidacy has to be allowed to begin somewhere, particularly when the candidate offers both serious policy ideas and a potentially important institutional strategy for independent senators.
Still, the awkwardness of the choice makes the case for election reform better than almost anything we could write about it.
Ranked-choice voting would let Coloradans vote for the candidate they actually prefer without surrendering their say over the ultimate choice between the remaining candidates.
Most political endorsements force a choice between two somewhat different questions: Who is the candidate you like best, and who is the candidate you actually want voters to support?
Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system largely removes that problem.
That is why our recommendation in this year’s U.S. Senate race may look a little unusual. We rank retired Petersburg teacher Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. first, former Representative Mary Peltola second, and incumbent Senator Dan S. Sullivan third. We recommend not ranking Gerald Heikes.
Although some may see Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy as a stunt built around his name, ranked-choice voting allows us to look past that novelty and recognize that, on policy and temperament, he presents a serious alternative.
We do not expect Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. to win. He received only a small share of the primary vote, has never held major public office, and became nationally known largely because he happens to share a name with the incumbent senator.
Then we looked at what he actually believes.
He sounds surprisingly like the kind of Republican we keep looking for and seldom find. He favors low taxes and a market-oriented economy, but he has criticized President Trump’s across-the-board tariffs for raising prices. He supports Ukraine. He accepts legitimate election results. He supports Alaska’s open-primary and ranked-choice system. He takes a moderate position on abortion and talks about political compromise as something necessary rather than shameful.
There are many things we still do not know about him. But ranked-choice voting allows us to put him first without pretending he is likely to become Alaska’s next senator.
Our second choice, Mary Peltola, is the candidate we would prefer in the likely decisive contest.
Peltola was an unusually independent Democrat during her service in the House. She supported Alaska oil and gas development, including the Willow project, while maintaining positions on firearms and other issues that frequently separated her from the national Democratic Party. She supports Ukraine and has been particularly good on an issue that increasingly matters to us: Congress reclaiming constitutional authority from the presidency over tariffs and war.
We disagree with her on important economic questions. Her proposed federal price-gouging prohibition is bad policy. So are some of her targeted tax subsidies. And she has opposed a carbon tax, which remains central to our climate policy.
Interestingly, we do not object to her support for Willow. Our test for approving a fossil-fuel project in the absence of a carbon tax is whether it would remain economic if carbon were properly priced. The available evidence suggests Willow would.
Incumbent Dan Sullivan presents a harder judgment.
He deserves genuine credit for refusing to participate in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His support for Ukraine, NATO and an engaged American foreign policy is also substantially closer to our position than that of many Republicans today.
But during President Trump’s second term, his institutional independence has become harder to find. He has supported Trump’s broad tariffs, resisted congressional efforts to reclaim war powers during the Iran conflict, and repeatedly supported unusually controversial presidential nominees when other Republican senators were willing to say no.
Those were not normal nominees. They included a mix of inadequate qualifications, questionable competence and, in some cases, records or views that seemed counterproductive to the missions of the agencies they were chosen to oversee.
That is why we put the incumbent third.
We do not recommend ranking Gerald Heikes, whose ideological rhetoric and extreme policy positions place him well outside CIVPAC’s centrist approach.
Ranked-choice voting lets us make all of these distinctions without forcing them into a binary choice.
I did not expect Mississippi to produce one of our more difficult Senate endorsements.
Cindy Hyde-Smith was the easy part. Her vote to reject valid electoral votes after the 2020 election, her record on Ukraine, and her repeated willingness to defer to Donald Trump when Congress should have been defending its own constitutional powers convinced us that Mississippi would be better served by someone else.
The harder question was Scott Colom or Ty Pinkins.
Pinkins gave us something we genuinely like. He is running as an independent and says he would caucus with neither party. More importantly, he has been discussing the creation of a bloc of independent senators—a Fulcrum Caucus—that could potentially hold the balance of power in a closely divided Senate.
We have supported that idea in other races. A handful of senators who could bargain over committee organization, amendment rights and other Senate procedures might loosen the grip of the two parties and make Congress work a little more like the institution the Constitution intended.
But there is an important distinction.
I am enthusiastic about using that leverage to reform the Senate. I am much less enthusiastic about using it to make enactment of a substantially left-wing policy agenda the price of organizing the chamber. Pinkins has suggested both. His support for universal health care and other economic policies goes considerably beyond our own approach to health care.
If Pinkins were proposing to reserve the leverage of a Fulcrum Caucus primarily for institutional reform—and if he appeared to be the stronger candidate against Hyde-Smith—I think we would have endorsed him.
Neither appears to be true.
Colom, meanwhile, has a record that is unusually attractive for a Democratic candidate in a deeply Republican state. As a district attorney, he has combined aggressive prosecution of violent crime with diversion and rehabilitation for first-time nonviolent offenders. He has earned respect from Republican officials as well as Democrats and has demonstrated a willingness to pursue wrongdoing by members of his own party.
He also presently has something Pinkins does not: a plausible, although still difficult, path to defeating Hyde-Smith.
There are positions where we disagree with Colom, and I remain particularly interested in hearing a clear statement from him on Ukraine and NATO. An endorsement is not a declaration that a candidate agrees with us about everything.
It is a choice among the candidates actually running.
In Mississippi, after giving Ty Pinkins considerably more thought than I initially expected, we chose Scott Colom.
Our endorsement of independent candidate Brian Bengs for the United States Senate from South Dakota was not an easy one.
Republican Senator Mike Rounds has done some things we respect. He has been a strong supporter of Ukraine, and after the 2020 election he rejected Donald Trump’s unsupported claims of widespread fraud and said plainly that Trump had lost a fair election.
But more recently, Rounds has too often gone along with an increasingly powerful presidency rather than insisting that Congress exercise its own constitutional responsibilities.
Bengs offers something different. He is running as a genuine independent and says he would caucus with neither major party. Along with several other independent Senate candidates, he has discussed creating an independent caucus that could serve as a fulcrum between Republicans and Democrats.
We find that possibility enormously attractive.
Congress has surrendered too much authority to presidents of both parties, while party leadership increasingly determines what individual members are expected to support. Even a small group of independent senators could make bipartisan coalitions easier and force Congress to behave more like an independent branch of government.
We have substantial disagreements with Bengs. We oppose his proposed wealth tax and have serious reservations about parts of his health-care and economic agenda. An endorsement does not require agreement on every issue.
It does require a judgment about which candidate would make the Senate—and the country—better.
In South Dakota, we believe that candidate is Brian Bengs.
This was a close call. Husted is stronger on several issues, school choice, right-to-work principles, and the Hyde Amendment. He also deserves credit for supporting Ukraine and for rejecting election denial after January 6.
But his Senate record matters. On controversial nominees, Trump’s tariffs, and congressional war powers, Husted has repeatedly sided with the administration even when other Republican senators chose to break with it.
Brown has plenty of positions we dislike, particularly on protectionism, unions, and price controls. But in the political environment of 2026, we believe the stronger need is for an independent legislative check on executive power.
Under a different president and Congress, this endorsement might go the other way.
Both candidates have strengths. Both have weaknesses. And under different national circumstances, I can easily imagine CIVPAC reaching the opposite conclusion.
Ashley Hinson has positions we like. She is generally more market-oriented than Turek. She supports right-to-work laws and school choice, positions substantially closer to our views on labor unions and K–12 education. She voted to accept the certified results of the 2020 presidential election and supported the Respect for Marriage Act. She is not simply an election-denying MAGA caricature.
Josh Turek, meanwhile, has plenty of positions we do not like.
He supports a wealth tax on billionaires. We do not. Our taxation, spending and debt policy favors a progressive tax system but puts considerable weight on economic efficiency, broad tax bases and long-term fiscal balance rather than new taxes on accumulated wealth.
Turek also supports federal food-price-gouging restrictions. We generally distrust price controls and laws that attempt to suppress price signals rather than address the underlying causes of scarcity.
He supports the PRO Act, which conflicts with our view that workers should be free to organize but that states should remain free to enact right-to-work laws. He would end school vouchers, while CIVPAC supports carefully designed experiments with vouchers and charter schools subject to common transparency and testing standards.
His foreign-policy views are also less developed than I would like in someone seeking a seat in the United States Senate.
So why endorse him?
Partly because endorsements are comparative judgments, not ideological purity tests.
Turek has demonstrated something we value enormously: an ability to represent people who do not necessarily share his party affiliation. Donald Trump carried his Iowa House district, yet Turek won it. He has crossed party lines on consequential votes and has been effective in a legislature overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans.
He is also substantially closer to us on abortion and personal liberty. And his combination of stronger border enforcement with a legal path for long-established undocumented residents is much closer to the compromise reflected in our immigration policy than either open-ended permissiveness or mass-deportation politics.
Turek also strongly opposes Trump’s broad tariffs. That puts him much closer to CIVPAC’s trade policy, which favors open trade, predictable rules and restoring greater congressional control over the use of tariffs.
Hinson, meanwhile, increasingly identifies herself with Donald Trump and his agenda. She has supported his broad tariff policies, which we regard as economically damaging and particularly inappropriate for an agricultural state.
She also voted against the 2026 Ukraine Support Act despite having previously expressed stronger support for resisting Russian aggression. CIVPAC’s Russia and Ukraine policy places considerable weight on deterrence, alliance reliability and denying Russia the benefits of territorial aggression.
Most importantly, the current political environment changes the weight we assign to these differences.
If Donald Trump and Trumpism were not dominant forces within the Republican Party, this endorsement might be different.
If Democrats controlled the presidency and Congress and the greater need were for a market-oriented check on the left, this endorsement might also be different.
In that environment, Hinson’s positions on taxes, school choice, labor policy and regulation might well carry greater weight.
But we do not make endorsements for an imaginary political system. We make them for the one that exists.
Today, institutional independence, constitutional restraint, respect for individual liberty, sensible trade policy, support for American alliances and a willingness by members of Congress to act as legislators rather than extensions of a president deserve unusual weight.
On balance, Turek comes out ahead.
Not by much.
That is why “endorsement by faint praise” seems about right. It is not meant as an insult to Turek. It is a recognition that serious political choices are often between imperfect alternatives.
CIVPAC’s purpose is not to find candidates with whom we agree on everything. It is to decide which available candidate is more likely to move government in a sensible, centrist and institutionally responsible direction.
In Iowa, by a narrow margin, we believe that candidate is Josh Turek.
Centrist Independent Voter has endorsed Democrat James Talarico for the United States Senate from Texas over Republican Ken Paxton.
This is not an endorsement of every part of Talarico’s agenda. He is to our left on several economic issues, and we have significant disagreements with some of his proposals on taxes, spending and health care. But he is also a thoughtful and unusually interesting candidate who has shown a willingness to talk about policy in practical rather than purely ideological terms.
Paxton’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, his close identification with Trumpism and his broader record raise fundamental concerns about institutional responsibility and the independence we expect from a United States senator.
Talarico offers Texas voters a very different kind of politics. We will disagree with him, sometimes substantially. But we believe he would bring greater respect for democratic institutions, greater independence of judgment and a more constructive approach to governing.
In a Texas Senate race that has become genuinely competitive, that is enough to make the choice clear.
This is not an endorsement without reservations. Collins has too often supported President Trump when stronger independence would have been welcome. But in recent months she has also shown that she is still willing to break with her party on important institutional and policy questions, including voting against Todd Blanche for attorney general, opposing continued military action against Iran without congressional authorization, and challenging parts of the administration’s tariff and immigration policies.
Her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, is a serious candidate with substantial experience in Maine government. We agree with his support for Ukraine, but his positions on Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, eliminating the Senate filibuster and restructuring the Supreme Court move well beyond the pragmatic reforms CIVPAC favors.
We do not endorse Collins without reservations, but in this race we believe she is clearly the better choice.
Cooper is not a perfect fit for CIVPAC. We disagree with him on some economic and education policies, and Republican Michael Whatley is closer to us on several issues, including school choice and parts of immigration and energy policy.
But Cooper brings a long record of competent statewide leadership, experience governing with a Republican legislature, and demonstrated willingness to reach bipartisan agreements. He has also supported Ukraine, taken a pragmatic approach to immigration, and shown a healthier understanding of the institutional role of an elected official.
Whatley, by contrast, has made loyalty to President Trump central to his campaign and previously echoed unsupported claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
Elections require choices among the candidates actually running. On balance, Cooper is clearly the better choice.
