On March 4, Greg Ballard, former Mayor of Indianapolis, said he will run as an independent candidate for Indiana Secretary of State this year. See this story. He will need 36,943 signatures. No statewide independent petition has succeeded in Indiana since 1992, when Ross Perot ran as an independent presidential candidate.
Indiana has no gubernatorial nor U.S. Senate election this year. Secretary of State is the most important statewide office up, and is at the top of the 2026 ballot.
On March 4, Seth Bodnar declared as an independent candidate for U.S. Senate from Montana. See this story.
The highest percentage ever received by a U.S. Senate candidate in Montana who was not a Republican or Democratic nominee was in 1912, when the Progressive Party’s candidate, Joseph M. Dixon, polled 32.1%, ahead of the Republican nominee. The 1912 U.S. Senate election was technically an advisory vote, because at the time the U.S. Constitution still required legislators to choose Senators. Montana and a few other western states held advisory U.S. Senate votes to influence whom the legislature should choose.
On March 3, Joe Slavet, a Republican businessman from Silicon Valley who had been running for Governor of California, announced that he won’t run. He had been considered one of the prominent Republicans running, but the other two Republicans, Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton, were far ahead of him.
On March 3, Rusty Hicks, chair of the California Democratic Party, posted a letter on the party’s website. It asks Democratic candidates for Governor not to file if their chances of winning seem low. And it says if they do file, but their chances seem dim, they should announce no later than April 15 that they are suspending their campaign. In California, candidates who file cannot later remove their names from the ballot.
It is unfortunate that Hicks doesn’t publicly call for adding write-in space to the November ballot. California elections generally allow write-in votes, but in 2012 the legislature passed AB 1413, which removed write-in space from the November ballot for congress and partisan state office.
On February 20, a 9-day trial concluded in Florida Decides Healthcare v Byrd, n.d., 4:25cv-211, the lawsuit over laws passed by the Florida legislature last year making it almost impossible for initiatives to get on the ballot. The trial did not go well for the state. See this story, describing how the judge characterized the state’s evidence about petition fraud as “junk science” and “nonsense.”
Closing briefs are due March 19.
