October 21, 2025 10:37 AM UTC

New Candidate in CO-05 Hopes for Independent Magic

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Ernest Luning reports for the publication formerly known as the Colorado Statesman, a long-rumored Independent candidate in Colorado Springs has jumped into the race for Congress against incumbent Republican Rep. Jeff Crank:

Army combat veteran and author Matt Cavanaugh on Tuesday launched an independent bid to challenge first-term Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank in Colorado’s 5th Congressional District, predicting that its voters are hungry for an alternative to what he termed the “broken two-party system.”

“I’m as unhappy with this same old, broken Washington as everybody else is, but if we keep nominating more of the same candidates, we’re going to get more of the same dysfunction,” the 46-year-old retired lieutenant colonel, West Point graduate and record-holding ultramarathon racer told Colorado Politics…

…Cavanaugh, who calls himself a “lifelong independent” — and once argued in an opinion column that uniformed members of the military shouldn’t vote in federal elections — said there’s no better place to “break us out of this sort of two-party doom loop we’re in” than the 5th CD, where 52% of registered voters don’t belong to any political party.

“Independent voters represent the majority in the district, and we’re fed up with Washington’s screw-ups and corruption. Because of the broken two-party system, Space Command’s gone, the government’s shut down (and) inflation, costs and political violence are all up,” Cavanaugh said in a statement.

Cavanaugh isn’t wrong in saying that voters are increasingly souring on both Democrats and Republicans, but there’s a big ol’ “HOWEVER” that needs to be included in this analysis. The next Independent candidate to win a significant non-municipal race in Colorado will be the first (at least in modern Colorado political history). Yemi Mobolade was elected Mayor of Colorado Springs in 2023 as an “Independent” candidate, but that’s a lot easier to do in a city election where races are generally less partisan. If Cavanaugh were to win in 2026, he would be the first Independent candidate elected to Congress — anywhere in the country — in 36 years. As Luning notes:

While independents currently hold two U.S. Senate seats — Vermont’s Bernie Sanders and Maine’s Angus King, who both caucus with the Democrats — the last time an independent candidate was elected to an initial term in the House was 1990, when Sanders won the first of his eight terms in that chamber before his election to the Senate. In recent decades, a handful of lawmakers dropped their affiliation and declared themselves independents while in office but didn’t stand for reelection.

Cavanaugh points to the number of “Unaffiliated” registered voters in CO-05 as a way to support the idea that an Independent can win, but there is absolutely no correlation that we’ve ever seen that suggest “Unaffiliated” voters are more likely to side with an Independent candidate. As we’ve noted many times in this space, “Unaffiliated” is not a political party or even a loose coalition — it’s just a word to describe voters who don’t want to affiliate with Democrats or Republicans. In Colorado, you’re automatically registered as an “Unaffiliated” voter when you get a driver’s license, and most people don’t bother to change their affiliation later. Statewide election results in Colorado also indicate that most “Unaffiliated” voters side with Democratic candidates; you can’t win a statewide race in Colorado with only the support of one of the major parties.

Cavanaugh is unlikely to win this race, but that doesn’t mean his candidacy is irrelevant. If Cavanaugh can run a legitimate campaign, the bigger question is whether he potentially pulls more votes away from Crank or likely Democratic nominee Jessica Killin. If this were a statewide campaign, we’d say Cavanaugh would be more likely to pull votes from the Democrat; but in a conservative stronghold like Colorado Springs, “Unaffiliated” voters may be more likely to lean to the right. We’ll likely have a better sense of this next year when more polling data starts to leak out in CO-05.