With well over a year until the 2026 midterm elections, Democrats and Republicans are already gearing up for expensive fights in House, Senate and governor’s races across the country.
Enter Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who is betting that there is a path to becoming Michigan’s next governor without embracing either of those party labels.
Duggan, a longtime Democrat who has served for over a decade as Detroit’s mayor, announced in December that he would run an independent campaign to succeed Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who cannot run for a third term next year. It’s an audacious bet, in one of the nation’s most tightly divided swing states, that voters who say they are fed up with both parties are ready to back another choice.
But while some of the political conditions seem ripe, recent independents running in three-way elections haven’t been able to push that sentiment to victory.
“Every place I go, the depth of anger at the two parties runs deep,” Duggan told NBC News in an interview.
He said he decided to run as an independent to escape the political expectations that come with serving one party or the other in Lansing, describing the current environment in the state capital as “toxic.” Michigan currently has a divided state Legislature, with Democrats narrowly controlling the state Senate (and the governorship) while Republicans control the state House after wresting it back from Democrats in 2024.
“Every single conversation in Lansing was, ‘Will this bill help me keep the majority?’ ‘Will this bill help me get the majority?’ And nobody was solving any problems,” Duggan said. “They wanted to create a moment that they could [use to] send out fundraising appeals off of some type of conflict.”
Opportunity — and an uphill climb — for independent candidates
Across the country, the appetite for third-party candidates is growing. A recent NBC News analysis found that Americans are increasingly registering to vote as unaffiliated voters, opting not to identify with a political party. Voters hold negative views of both parties, and the Democratic Party earlier this year notched its lowest ratings in 35 years of NBC News polling.
Some prominent political figures have sought out a third option, away from both major parties. In the past three years, two former senators — Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — left the Democratic Party and registered as independents.
More recently, Elon Musk, a tech mogul and former adviser to President Donald Trump who spent more than a quarter-billion dollars to help him in 2024, posted on X amid a feud with Trump about the appetite for “a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle,” though it’s unclear how serious Musk was. (Duggan wrote in response to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, “Now you’ve got my attention…” alongside a smiley emoji.)
That sentiment aside, turning the broad idea of unhappiness with the two parties into actual statewide victory for an independent candidate is difficult, as recent years of elections show.
In Oregon, former state Sen. Betsy Johnson mounted a well-funded independent campaign for governor in 2022, at times receiving almost 20% of voters’ support in public polling. But on Election Day, Johnson received under 9% of the vote, with Democrat Tina Kotek winning the race.
Last year in Nebraska, Navy veteran Dan Osborn ran an independent campaign for Senate that gained national attention. Democrats didn’t field a candidate in the race and Osborn lost to incumbent Sen. Deb Fischer, a Republican, by over 6 points, though he held Fischer well below Trump’s margin in the state.
In Michigan, Duggan insists that he’s received support from voters on both sides of the aisle, saying he’s simply offering them a choice outside of the traditional two-party binary.
“This whole evenly divided, Republican and Democrat ‘attack each other every two years in an election cycle’ isn’t working for Michigan, and maybe I give the voters a different choice,” Duggan said.
A big race in a key state
Duggan’s presence adds another layer of complexity as both parties gear up for a competitive race.
Though Whitmer won her second term by more than 10 points, Michigan is typically a tightly balanced battleground. In 2024, the state backed Trump for president by less than 2 points and Democrat Elissa Slotkin for Senate by an even slimmer margin. Four years earlier, Biden defeated Trump in the Great Lakes State by nearly 3 points.
But Democrats and Republicans still have to sort out who their nominees for governor will be, and voters don’t head to the polls in the state’s primary until August of next year.
On the Democratic side, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist and Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson have launched campaigns to succeed Whitmer. Republican Rep. John James, state Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt, former state House Speaker Tom Leonard and former state Attorney General Mike Cox have all jumped into the GOP primary.
“[Duggan] announced right at the beginning of the year, which gives him a full two years with no primary to get around the state and tell his story,” Jason Roe, a Republican strategist in Michigan who is not currently working for any gubernatorial candidate, told NBC News.
With Democrats and Republicans focused on their own primaries, “there’s really no reward to any of those candidates to attack him,” Roe said, adding: “And so I think he gets to go around, you know, talking about rainbows and unicorns” without getting attacked.
Democrats have targeted Duggan recently, if not in a way many voters would have seen, accusing him of corruption in one digital ad funded by the Democratic Governors Association’s Victory Fund in May.
“Duggan is running a self-serving campaign that has no path to victory,” DGA communications director Sam Newton told NBC News in a statement, adding: “The DGA has beaten attention-grabbing third-party candidates before — and we’re confident that we’ll do it again in Michigan in 2026.”
Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel also slammed Duggan, telling NBC News that the mayor is only running as an independent because he didn’t want to run in the Democratic primary.
“I think most of this is about Mike’s ego. It was bruised by the fact that he couldn’t actually win a Democratic primary,” Hertel said. “He has very thin skin.”
On the other side of the aisle, Republicans haven’t yet engaged in formal campaigning against Duggan. But one national Republican strategist noted that the Michigan race is going to be competitive — and expensive — next fall whether Duggan is drawing significant support or not.
Roe noted Duggan’s popularity in and around Detroit, adding that he’s well-liked by Michigan’s business leaders.
“People see the business community, the organized business community, migrating to him,” he said.
Roe, who lives in the suburban Detroit area, said that Republicans in his area seem particularly attracted to Duggan’s campaign as well. But he cautioned against drawing conclusions about Duggan’s popularity among partisans until after next year’s primary.
“There’s a big but here. They don’t have a binary choice. They don’t know who the Republicans are. They don’t know who Democrats are,” he said.
Hertel compared Duggan’s support now to that of early support for previous independent candidates elsewhere.
“What we’ve seen, a lot of times, with these independent candidates, is, you know, they get a lot of attention at first, but when we get closer to election time, people make different decisions,” Hertel said.
“Right now it’s, ‘Well, I know Duggan, and I feel Duggan has done some great stuff in Detroit. No clue about these other people,’ right?” Roe said. “Once there’s nominees, and you have three people to choose from, that will likely change.”
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