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Alani Bankhead, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Montana, should end her campaign and clear the path for independent Seth Bodnar to consolidate the votes of the state’s non-Republicans. Bodnar is polling better than Bankhead in head-to-head matchups against Republican candidate Kurt Alme and probably has a better chance of winning. And a Bodnar win could be critical, potentially denying the Republicans the fiftieth seat they need to control the Senate. This shouldn’t just be a strategy for one Senate race in Montana. Democratic leaders, strategists, and ultimately voters need to start regularly backing independent candidates in very red places, at least for the next few election cycles. This may not work. But we should test every possible approach to keep politicians nominated by today’s radical, antidemocratic Republican Party out of power, and running independents has real potential to do just that. The reality is that Democratic candidates simply can’t win races in many states and districts right now. (And the same is true for Republicans in very blue areas.) It’s hard for Democrats to accept this reality because they remember the exceptions to this rule. Alabama’s Doug Jones, Montana’s Jon Tester, Kansas’s Laura Kelly, Louisiana’s John Bel Elwards, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear are among the Democrats who have won in very red areas over the last decade. But those are outliers, usually with some specific explanation. (Manchin and Tester were incumbents who had first been elected in less polarizing eras. So had Beshear’s father, Steve. Jones’s Republican opponent was accused of sexually assaulting underage girls.) The overwhelming majority of Democratic candidates in those states and other red places lose. These candidates aren’t losing simply because they are too liberal. (Tester lost his 2024 reelection bid, and Manchin almost certainly would have been defeated if he had run as a Democrat for another term two years ago.) Democrats who take conservative stands, such as opposing abortion rights, run all the time and still lose in red states. What’s plaguing them is the label Democrat. Today, much more so than in the past, many voters and therefore entire districts and states almost never will back a candidate from the opposite party, no matter their policy stands. The party brands eclipse any individual. Swing voters exist. But their ranks are small. So both parties can win statewide races in Michigan or Wisconsin, but Republicans almost always win in Kentucky, as do Democrats in Massachusetts. But shunning the party label seems to help shake up this state of affairs. In 2022, Never-Trump former Republican Evan McMullin ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Utah as an independent, even though he was as critical of MAGA Republicans as most Democrats. He lost by 10 percentage points. Two years later, an anti-MAGA candidate who ran as a Democrat lost by 30 in a Utah Senate race. Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, a mechanic and union leader, ran for the Senate in 2024 and lost by seven. In that same election, Kamala Harris ran 20 points behind Donald Trump, and in Nebraska’s other U.S. Senate race, a Democratic candidate lost by 25 to a Republican. In both McMullin’s and Osborn’s races, the Democratic Party didn’t really run anyone, allowing the independent candidates to get all Democratic votes without having to use the party’s label. Osborn is running again this year and effectively tied in polls against Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts. In Montana, polling also suggests the value of an independent candidacy. The Democratic-leaning firm GQR released a survey this week showing the Republican Alme at 41 percent, the independent Bodnar at 27, and the Democrat Bankhead at 21. (There is a Libertarian candidate getting a small percentage of the vote too.) If the independent Bodnar is not included in the poll, Republican Alme leads 44–40 over Democrat Bankhead. But if the Democrat Bankhead is not included, the independent Bodnar has a 44–40 lead over Republican Alme. We are talking about a fairly small advantage—independent Bodnar leading by four, while Democrat Bankhead is down by four. This poll alone does not give assurance that the independent Bodnar would certainly win, that the Democratic Bankhead would certainly lose, or that Bodnar would do better than Bankhead against the Republican. But the long record of Democrats losing Montana and other red states and the better showings by independents in other states in that region make me think that Bodnar would be the superior candidate. And one thing is for certain: Having them both run guarantees a Republican victory. I would normally be reluctant to ask a candidate to stand down. Bankhead ran in a competitive primary and won. She has earned the right to be on the ballot and force Bodnar and Alme to beat her. We aren’t in normal times, though. A Senate without a GOP majority could be a critical bulwark against Trump, most notably in stopping the appointment of more ultra-right-wing judges. If one of the conservative judges on the U.S. Supreme Court dies or suddenly can’t serve because of health reasons, I want a Trump nominee to get confirmed only if he can win the votes of some non-Republican senators. So Senate seats really, really matter right now. Bodnar has committed to not joining the Senate Democratic Caucus if elected. But he will not join the GOP, either. More importantly, he would not be an automatic vote in favor of Trump’s agenda, as outgoing senator Steve Daines is and Alme likely would be, as well. There are four real shortcomings to this independent strategy. First, it may never work in actually defeating a Republican candidate in a red state. McMullin and Osborn were the more liberal candidates in their races and tacitly backed by the Democratic Party. And that likely limited their ability to appeal to stalwart Republican voters, the majority of the electorate in red states. Bodnar, who is backed by Tester and other prominent Democrats in Montana, will also likely be seen as essentially a Democratic candidate by many Montana voters, complicating his path to victory. Second, if Osborn and/or Bodnar make it to Washington, they won’t be full-fledged Democrats. If 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats, and Osborn and Bodnar are elected to the Senate this fall, the Republicans would likely remain in charge of the chamber and determine the agenda, because JD Vance would be the fiftieth GOP vote. And Osborn and Bodnar would probably try to cast high-profile votes with Republicans and against Democrats to solidify their independent bona fides. Think of Manchin or Kyrsten Simena—but maybe worse. These senators would be formally independent from the Democratic Party. Third, this strategy weakens the party in the long term. In pursuing this course in Utah, Nebraska, and now potentially Montana, Democrats are essentially announcing that their party brand is toxic and can’t win in certain states. That’s certainly true right now. But that admission reinforces that weakness. This is not how a confident party would act. It also denies the party opportunities to get stronger in red states. Perhaps Nebraska’s Osborn would win fewer votes by running as a Democrat, but he might convince more union workers or mechanics to join the party if he were running under its banner. Same for Bodnar. “His candidacy is entirely focused on one short-term win—and if what he’s doing becomes the norm, there might be no rescuing the party from the wreckage,” former Tester aide Nick Perkins wrote in a recent TNR essay. Fourth, I suspect that this independent strategy will unfairly prop up white male candidates and diminish women and people of color. McMullin, Osborn, and Bodnar are white men. Bodnar is attempting to push aside a female candidate in Bankhead. McMullin, Osborn, and Bodnar’s supporters likely assume they can win over Republican voters in part because of their race and gender. I worry that liberal-leaning women and people of color in the South or West who seek broader support for their independent candidacies won’t get it and that women and people of color who win Democratic nominations will increasingly get shunted aside for white male independents. That, I admit, is a lot of shortcomings. This strategy is kind of sexist and racist, weakens the Democratic brand, and will at best send Joe Manchin types to Washington. But I still want to see this independent experiment tried widely. And that’s partly because of where I live. Here in Kentucky, Democratic candidates just have no chance. Beshear aside, Republicans win virtually all statewide races by 15 percentage points or more. But on policy, this is not an ultraconservative state. Voters rejected recent ballot initiatives designed to outlaw abortions and create an expansive school voucher program. Voters in the state’s rural areas truly hate the Democratic Party, though. I suspect we can have semi-competitive elections and occasional victories by non-Republicans only if alternative candidates are running as independents instead of Democrats. In Montana, Bankhead, the Democratic candidate, insists she won’t drop out by the August 10 deadline.  And the state’s Republican secretary of state says that the Democratic Party would have to choose another candidate if she left the race. But ideally, the party would replace Bankhead with someone who isn’t really running and essentially concedes the Democratic vote to Bodnar. Even if all that happened, the Republican Senate candidate not winning in Montana, which Trump carried by 20 points in 2024, is a long shot. It’s a shot worth taking, creatively and yes, independently. A Senate with Seth Bodnar in it will be 1 percent less pro-Trump—and we need every percent we can take to fight our authoritarian president. For now, a winning Democratic Party will be one that tries to win in a few less places. 

Last summer, we often watched ICE raids unfold live, captured by news helicopters and eyewitness video as—almost exactly one year ago—agents descended on day laborers, street vendors, garment workers, and farmworkers in southern California. Frequently, the raids were preceded by warnings vetted by community-based groups and passed around on Instagram Reels, and followed by reports from local outlets, such as L.A. TACO’s accounting of daily arrests. For weeks, for months, we watched as people turned out across cities and surrounding communities. The kinds of resistance now synonymous with cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis—residents putting themselves between immigration agents and their neighbors, chasing agents from the hotels where they tried to sleep and from the gas stations where they stocked up for their sick road trips—defined the administration’s first year of what it called “mass deportations.” In truth, what we witnessed were just some of the thousands and thousands of violent abductions carried out by federal agents, all in service of a white nationalist agenda eagerly articulated by regime leaders like the White House’s Stephen Miller and lackeys like Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino.Compared to the open battle the agency engaged in last year, ICE appears now to be attempting to maintain a lower profile. And yet the agency has also arrested and detained more people in recent months than at any time since Trump returned to office. Recent data released by ICE shows that in June, it hit a high—1,300 arrests on average each day. That record was then topped in July, which saw 1,474 average daily arrests over just the first 11 days of the month. “This reverses a trend we saw since the early fall where overall arrest numbers had actually remained fairly consistent or declined,” observed Austin Kocher, assistant research professor at Syracuse University. “The purported shift in ICE tactics—from the manic Kristi Noem months that cost the lives of two U.S. citizens to the less spectacular tactics under Markwayne Mullin—has effectively led to more arrests without as much popular backlash.” There is a difference between a change in ICE tactics and a change in the number of people whom ICE has detained and deported, and understanding the reason for the latter requires us to look beyond ICE for answers. ICE’s purported shift was remarked upon over the winter, when Bovino was benched after immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. More recently, when immigration agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine within days of each other, ICE was briefly suspended from traffic stops. But immigration agents themselves have long known—or at least, some of those whose words have made it into the legal record have known—that despite public outcry over ICE operations, not much beyond appearances has really changed. “They just changed the name,” one agent said in a deposition, when questioned about “Operation At Large,” the high-profile nationwide operation last year. “We’re doing the same thing just with a different name.” In addition to proceeding as usual under a slightly altered brand, ICE is now working in even closer collaboration with other federal agencies in order to increase arrests: arresting people who allegedly overstayed visas at airports, with the help of TSA data; and arresting people whose children were previously in migrant shelters, based on tips shared by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. But ICE has been able to arrest and detain more people not only through these kinds of agreements with other federal agencies and offices. Its reach has also been broadened by local, county, and state law enforcement, a network of collaboration that goes back to the agency’s founding, and which has become only more sprawling since ICE was formed. Today, ICE’s partnership with the criminal legal system is fully activated in service of the mass deportations agenda. The sight of singular terrifying raids can sometimes conceal the more fearsome routine violence of anti-immigration law enforcement. This winter, at the height of ICE’s operations in the Twin Cities, about 3,000 immigration agents were on the streets. “At the same time, the number of arrests in Minnesota during that operation was less than half the number made through the Miami field office over the same period,” said Silky Shah of Detention Watch Network, in an interview this month with Kelly Hayes of Truthout. The Miami ICE field office continues to make the most arrests in the country, averaging about 120 each day. “There is so much collaboration happening between ICE and local law enforcement,” Shah explained, in Florida but also Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas, where local police, county sheriffs, and state troopers have explicit agreements with ICE, part of what’s known as the 287(g) program, in essence allowing “local law enforcement to act as de facto ICE agents with minimal training,” as journalist Jessica Pishko has reported. In those places with 287(g) agreements, Shah said, “the scale of enforcement is much greater, without the same level of spectacle.”Former ICE officials acknowledge how working with state and local law enforcement can boost arrests. “What you’re seeing in Miami is a by-product of a substantial immigrant presence,” former ICE acting Director John Sandweg told CBS News. “You’re also seeing higher levels of cooperation between state and local agencies and ICE.” At the same time, state and local opposition to ICE has been critical in slowing the expansion of detention camps, in demanding new protective policies, and pushing local and state agencies to sever 287(g) agreements—even in Florida. Last year, Key West officials voted to end the city’s 287(g) agreement after pressure from local advocates. In response, Florida’s attorney general threatened to remove those officials from office. Miami’s new mayor, a Democrat, pledged to end the city’s 287(g) agreement, made in June 2025. But after seven months in office, she has so far refused to use her power to introduce a proposal to do so to the City Commission, while the commission has stalled. The fear instilled by such agreements between local law enforcement and ICE reaches not only immigrant communities but clearly their elected representatives, as well.Immigrants rights and justice groups have long drawn attention to the entanglement of immigration enforcement and the criminal legal system. Law scholars have dubbed this “crimmigration” law, “the new creature of legal imagination and policing reality,” as César Cuauhtémoc García Hernándezas characterized it in 2015. Because this overlap has been growing for so long, it tends not to grab the attention of those who aren’t themselves snared within it. Someone’s neighbors or co-workers, who might see a raid in progress, can’t so immediately observe a sheriff taking someone from a routine traffic stop to immigration detention. They won’t know when local police email an ICE field office to confirm that someone ICE is looking for is in their custody awaiting arraignment. Such routine policing has made the criminal legal system an ideal tool for a mass deportation regime seeking to more quietly entrench itself in everyday life.While that police work may not be drawing public notice, the administration has not been quiet about its plans. Homan and Miller were clear during the 2024 Trump campaign: They would turn to local police to carry out mass deportations. When that campaign was underway, I spoke with Meghan Maloney de Zaldivar, now the vice president of advocacy at the New York Immigration Coalition, about how racist and xenophobic rhetoric from Trump, Miller, and Homan (among others)—rhetoric like “criminal aliens,” “invasions” at the border, and “the worst of the worst”—creates permission for police. “The people who work within those forces now feel like they don’t have to restrain themselves, and take it upon themselves to take that initiative,” Maloney de Zaldivar explained in 2024. “That message is sent to those folks that they have the power and the backing of the White House to use their authority to take out that racism and hate on immigrants in their communities.” With or without explicit 287(g) agreements, city, county, and state law enforcement still get the message: If your mayor or governor doesn’t have your back, Trump does.Whatever political and propaganda value there was in ICE storming into communities has perhaps been drained. It is as if someone advised the mass deportation crowd that if that’s what they really want, it’s better achieved without witnesses. Or, worse: It’s as if those elected Democrats who don’t oppose ICE per se but merely want it to produce better optics, got their wish—see the calls to have ICE unmask and identify themselves, without fundamentally questioning the agency’s mission. This is what is meant by “Abolish Trump’s ICE”—not “Abolish ICE”—as some Democratic candidates have campaigned. It is too soon to know just what, if anything, has changed at the top of ICE, other than that Noem’s replacement at the Department of Homeland Security hopes the press will look away. But we must not confuse what we aren’t seeing day in and day out with an institutional turn away from Trump’s signature promise: to ethnically cleanse the United States, using federal law enforcement. We must not ignore how the police around us day in and day out are marshaled in service of that campaign.This summer, I write from Brooklyn, where I live close to several immigrant communities, including one now in need of urgent defense, and where our elected leaders may soon be tested. How will they respond to the possible mass deportation of Haitians, those who have been stripped of their legal status by the Trump administration? “[Forty thousand] New Yorkers are going to be losing their protections, their work authorization and their legal protections today, and it is just gutting,” said New York Immigration Coalition CEO Murad Awawdeh in an interview with The City Reporter on Monday. New York City’s still-new Mayor Zohran Mamdani believes in abolishing ICE (and has told the president he believes so), even as Tom Homan routinely threatens to flood New York neighborhoods with immigration agents.But critically: ICE is not the only problem. The city and state’s sanctuary laws, meant to bar local police from cooperating with ICE, are only as powerful as the people holding police to account, as Spencer Ackerman wrote in his Forever Wars newsletter on Tuesday. The commissioner of the New York Police Department, Jessica Tisch, at least theoretically answers to the city’s mayor, but in practice, the police hold immense power to set their day-to-day agenda, city officials be damned. “On one level, it’s important to compel Tisch to prove herself and the NYPD capable of noncooperation,” Ackerman writes. “But on another, more human level, noncooperation can hardly be sufficient against a lawless, violent deportations force empowered by the Supreme Court to racially profile.” Are we Miami or are we New York? Is “noncooperation” even enough?As the horror of Trump’s mass deportations campaign has become part of daily life, it has only become easier for state and local Democrats to oppose ICE. One would think they have even stronger ground to contest ICE when it comes to their collaboration with state and local police. When will they?

Louis Brandeis believed that facts could change lives and break excessive power where it accumulated. The post Louis Brandeis: The Empiricist appeared first on The American Prospect.

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