South Dakota’s Senate Race Hinges On An Independent

When union leader Dan Osborn came within 7 percentage points of beating an incumbent Republican senator in Nebraska in 2024, he wasn’t running as a Democrat. Instead, he had chosen an independent platform.

Osborn wasn’t the first to try this. There was Greg Orman in Kansas in 2014 and Evan McMullin in Utah in 2022 — both of whom ran closer than Democrats had in recent elections. But Osborn’s bid came as the political parties have become increasingly polarized. His relative success in opting out of the two-party system drew attention. And he started to receive calls from independents in nearby states.

One of those calls came from Brian Bengs, a retired Navy and Air Force veteran and war college educator living in Hot Springs, South Dakota. He was interested, he said, in following Osborn’s example and asked Osborn if he would run again. Osborn said yes.

In 2026, both of them are running for Senate as independents — following up on the signal that populist campaigns run outside the party system could turn races normally ignored by both Democrats and Republicans into real competitions. These candidates hope it will become a strategy to introduce political competition into national races in solidly red states.

“People will talk to you and continue talking to you when you say you are an independent, as opposed to Democrat or Republican,” Bengs told HuffPost.

But while Osborn’s race to oust incumbent Sen. Pete Ricketts in Nebraska has attracted national attention, significant fundraising and public polling, Bengs’ bid against Republican incumbent Sen. Mike Rounds in South Dakota has not. No one has South Dakota on their list of states that Republicans could lose in this year’s midterm elections.

Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 2-to-1 in South Dakota. President Donald Trump won the state with more than 60% of the vote three times. The last Republican to do that more than once was Ronald Reagan. No Democrat has won statewide office since 2008.

But then the same could be said for Nebraska, where no Democrat has cleared 40% in a presidential race since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, however, cleared that bar in South Dakota.

“In South Dakota, the tide here has for years favored Republicans,” said Rick Knobe, a longtime local radio personality and former Republican Sioux Falls mayor who has since turned independent and now endorses Bengs. But that could be just the problem. “They’ve been riding the tide and coasting along without too much difficulty. That has started to shift. It’s been shifting slowly, but in the last 24 months since the extremely toxic Donald Trump became president, I think the tide has turned more quickly.”

The national political situation for Republicans has deteriorated amid rising gas, diesel and food prices and Trump’s sinking popularity. In South Dakota, where ranching and farming are a major source of income and work, that’s been amplified as the effects of Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war have cut off markets and driven up prices for everything from fuel to fertilizer.

Meanwhile, Bengs’ internal polls show him either tied or slightly trailing the incumbent Rounds. He says his campaign is “going exceptionally well” and is “on rocket fuel at this point.”

“I’m more convinced than ever that the only way to save the republic and restore it to what it was supposed to be originally, where the voice of the people controls,” Bengs said, “is that it has to be an independent that steps up.”

Perhaps, there’s something happening in South Dakota. But even if Bengs doesn’t actually win, his bid, like Osborn’s before it, could be a portent for how independents may be able to change the rigid red-blue map that has dominated American politics for the entire 21st century.

“They’re showing that it’s possible and every election cycle we’ve seen more of them run,” said Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Independent Veterans of America, a nonprofit supporting veterans like Bengs who run for office as independents. “We’ve seen a deeper bench, a higher quality of candidate and more fundraising. This is truly a movement that will be iterative and will build on itself — we are looking at it as a generational fight.”

Because even where Republicans are in trouble, it may be a mistake to assume that means an opening for Democrats. In 2022, Bengs ran against GOP Sen. John Thune as a Democrat. It didn’t go well. “I’ve described the 2022 race as soul-sucking,” Bengs said.

A lifelong independent, Bengs decided that year it was easier to register with the Democratic Party to gain ballot access. He lost — by a lot. And learned a valuable lesson.

“The identity politics precluded me from having the types of conversations with individuals and the state writ large on big issues that we need to have big conversations on, just because of the partisanship,” Bengs said. Whenever he talked to people in this heavily Republican state, he found they would agree with him on a lot of issues, but when he told them he was running as a Democrat, that was the end of the conversation.

After losing to Thune by 43 points, Bengs immediately changed his political affiliation back to independent, the same affiliation he’d had since he first registered at 18 years old. And after seeing Osborn’s success in 2024, he decided to run again, but without the party label and all the baggage that came with it.

This time around, Bengs thinks voters have finally listened to his populist anti-corruption message that includes a policy agenda of getting money out of politics, breaking up corporate monopolies, taxing the rich, establishing term limits, and stopping data center construction.

“The biggest difference from 2022 is when people ask ‘What are you?’ I can say, ‘I’m an independent.’ They keep talking to me,” Bengs said. “I talk to conservative voters and they are on board, not with everything, but with some big-ticket things, and they will keep talking to me.”

Now calling himself a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican,” after the progressive president who famously moved to the Badlands of the Dakota Territory as a young man, Bengs has promised to remain independent and not caucus with either political party in the Senate. He and other independents running for Senate in 2026, including Osborn, Montana’s Seth Bodnar and Idaho’s Todd Achilles, have stated that, if enough of them win, they could form an independent caucus in the center that could either dictate control of the Senate or play a sizable role in directing the chamber’s agenda.

But even with voter engagement, there was one additional hurdle for Bengs’ independent campaign to clear. Osborn’s success in making Nebraska competitive in 2024 and, seemingly, again in 2026 was due to the Democratic nominee dropping out both times. He needed to be in a head-to-head race, instead of the existing three-way contest with Rounds and Democratic Party nominee Julian Beaudion.

“In states like South Dakota, the Democrats are a spoiler,” Rieckhoff said.

National Democratic leaders publicly pushed for Beaudion to drop out and also pushed Democratic candidates in Idaho and Montana to cede the field to independents. Meanwhile, local South Dakota party activists and organizations decided Bengs had a stronger path than the Democrat.

“It was very clear to all of us that Brian Bengs was the only challenger with a viable campaign,” said Ngoc Thach, a Sioux Falls political operative who runs the group Turn SD Purple.

After interviewing both candidates and talking to their supporters, Thach’s group, which was not formed to back independent candidates, endorsed Bengs over Beaudion. She cited Bengs’ fundraising advantage as key to the group’s endorsement. This caused a “rupture,” Thach said, as many Democrats who backed Beaudion and were involved in Turn SD Purple were “really upset.”

Ultimately, Beaudion dropped out of the race in time to have his name removed from the ballot.

There’s still bad blood between the Bengs campaign and the South Dakota Democratic Party, which is not helping his campaign like the Nebraska Democratic Party is helping Osborn’s.

“Bengs was temporarily registered as a Democrat, to use our resources in his last statewide race (2022); he’s always been an independent,” Jessica Meyers, vice chair of the South Dakota Democratic Party, told Dakota News Now after Beaudion dropped out. “We wish him the best of luck; we have no interest in endorsing his campaign.”

For Thach, the decision to endorse an independent over a Democrat came down to what’s needed to beat Republicans in a red state.

“In a state like ours, the very important thing that everyone is still learning or needs to keep front and center is that South Dakota’s political imbalance makes coalition-building unusually important to understand,” Thach said. “It forced us to think beyond the usual Democratic vs. Republican framework.”

Now running in a head-to-head matchup, Bengs hopes his independent label and anti-corruption message break through the usual attacks that bedevil Democratic candidates. He hasn’t been spared, despite his party affiliation.

“Just like any other Democrat, ‘independent’ Brian Bengs is fundraising on ActBlue and has even endorsed fellow ‘independent’ Dan Osborn — who backs the tax-hiking policies of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — for Senate Majority Leader,” Bernadette Breslin, National Republican Senatorial Committee national press secretary, said in a statement to HuffPost.

Rounds has also tagged Bengs as a “socialist,” an opponent of gun ownership and a supporter of “boys in girls sports” while refusing to participate in debates or appear at town halls in the state. Bengs denies all of these things while also rejecting the entire culture war premise to begin with.

“My attempt in doing this is to not wade into the culture wars because the real war that I talk about with people is it’s big money vs. the rest of us,” Bengs said. “The real fight is not the left-right fight that is used and funded by big money to keep us divided so we don’t unite and do anything against the interests of big money controlling our government.”

This anti-corruption message is aimed at everything from the influence of big money in politics to the concentrated power of monopolies to the concentrated wealth in the hands of the few to giving the people control over the sites of AI data centers. It is, in many ways, an echo of the prairie populism that led South Dakota to elect Populist Party candidates as governor and to Congress at the turn of the 20th century and vote for Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party in the 1912 presidential election.

Today, though, Republicans hold a tight grip on all levers of power in the state. In his last election, Rounds won by a comfortable 31 points. Rounds also holds a massive fundraising advantage over Bengs — although it is somewhat smaller than what he would have held over Beaudion. Outside money is also beginning to flow into the state to support Rounds. Super PACs backing Rounds have already spent close to $1 million on the race, while an AI industry super PAC plans to enter the race to back him soon.

But in his first Senate campaign in 2014, Rounds only barely cleared 50%. In that race, he was running against three challengers: former Republican Sen. Larry Pressler running as an independent, Democrat Rick Weiland and independent conservative Gordon Howie. Those three challengers combined for 49% of the vote against a sitting governor in a terrible year for Democrats.

That, perhaps more than anything, shows how independent candidates can pull voters Democrats otherwise could not.

“It would be interesting if Brian hit 48% and I would still call that a win,” Thach said, “because it’s a huge message to Mike Rounds.”