Adam Brandon, Author of The Exhausted Majority — the ALPolitics.com Interview

Independents now make up the largest group of voters in the country, but American politics continues to revolve around the Democrat-Republican duopoly. With support for the both major parties waning, there has been a great deal of discussion about third parties and how a new party might come to power.

Adam Brandon, author of The Exhausted Majority, has proposed a different approach to addressing the issue of discontent with the two major parties. He was kind enough to speak with ALPolitics.com recently about his book and his ideas.

We began by asking him about the main idea of his book and what prompted him t0 write it.

“The book is The Exhausted Majority: Building a Home for the Politically Homeless,” Brandon began. “I wrote it to be a very short book that you could read in a few hours. It gets into all the data that we have on who independents are, what they believe in. Then, what I look at is how you can actually start to channel that by giving these people a voice to actually start driving change. Independents are the half of the population right now, but more importantly, the way that independents vote ends up deciding elections. Partisans make up less than half of the population now. It is independents that are going to start to decide elections, and that means they're going to decide policy going forward.”

We then asked why he argues against third parties in his book, as some others have suggested.

Brandon said, “I don't think you beat hyperpartisanship with a new party. When I look back at American history, what changes things? Look at the women's suffrage movement. Look at the civil rights movement. You look at anything big; it's a movement because movements are big enough and powerful enough to not only reshape one party, they reshape both parties.

“My main motivation in American politics is the 40-plus trillion dollars in debt that we have, and what that's going to mean for our country's future and our children's future. I think it's a big enough problem that there's no Republican way to solve it. There's no Democrat way to solve it. You're going to need all Americans to pile in and lean. And the way I look at it is, they have to. If they do that, that's the only thing that's going to be powerful enough to shake Washington up, so we actually get change, and we can get this debt and deficit under control.”

ALPolitics.com then asked, if he wasn’t suggesting forming a third party, how he proposed shaking up Washington enough to bring about real change.

“My experience in the 20-some years I've spent in this town (Washington, D.C.) is that most congressmen I've met have come here for all the right reasons,” Brandon said. “But when they get here, the system chews them up. And what do I mean about the system? Well, people don't realize this, but these committee seats that these congressmen get on, they have price tags. Yes, committee seats are for sale, and if you can't raise the money to give back to the party, you're not getting on a committee. That type of relationship, what it actually drives is, you might call corruption, but it's legal. That's where all the special interests get involved, and that's where they get their lock on the system. 

“What we are seeing is that, if you get people elected by a movement outside of the system that don't owe a party boss something, you actually give people the ability to just go and legislate.

“By the way, this is what our founders designed. They wanted the citizen legislator to be active in their community, to come to Washington for a short period of time, do their thing, and go home. George Washington, in his farewell address, warned the country against the specter of having permanent professional politicians and parties as what will lead to the country's ruin, and he was right.”

In The Exhausted Majority, Brandon discusses targeting independent campaigns across the nation, and claims that five independents could be able to leverage Congress. We asked Brandon to explain what he meant by this.

“So when I was growing up, in a big election, you would have a swing of thirty or forty seats. That is gone. If you look at recent Congresses, in the last 10 years, it is overwhelmingly the majority will be like two seats, three seats. Our point is that that (slim margin) is not going to change, and so, just the way the structure and what gerrymandering has been setting up this partisan split. Like right now, the Republicans have a majority of two.

“So, if you had three independents in Congress, neither party can form a majority, and that, to me, opens up Congress the way it was supposed to operate.

“If we had a bloc of independents who refused to caucus with Republicans or Democrats, you would have to get into a coalition, and during that coalition, you could actually negotiate to say, ‘Hey, we're going to take on this issue,’, and it's going to take the politics out of governing, which is what we need to deal with these serious problems we face.”

In closing, we asked Mr. Brandon where people could go to find out more, or to buy his book.

“Well, you can go to TheIndependentCenter.org. That's the best place to find us. We also have partnered with Senator Joe Manchin to create an organization called the Independent Leadership Council, which is kind of our effort right now to help get some Independents elected, so Independent Leadership Council or The Independent Center is where you find us. And by the way, I don't get a dime off of this book. Every cent of proceeds goes right back into our movement. It's called The Exhausted Majority,” Brandon concluded.

The Exhausted Majority: Building a Home for the Politically Homeless is available in both hardback and Kindle formats on Amazon.