Independence

Mr. Kennedy suspended his campaign on Friday and endorsed President Trump. I won’t be following him there.

This is not an angry departure. I came to this campaign because I believed an independent president leading a unity government was worth the long odds. This was about the system that produces these odds, and the alternative system we were trying to build in opposition to it.

The endorsement broke the possibility of an alternative.

I will continue to listen. I have heard from many of you—staff, volunteers, donors, friends—who think this is the wrong read, and I hold no contempt for that view. I may be wrong about the strategic calculus. I am not wrong about what I signed up for.

The room I cannot walk back into

In the early 2000s, my father was a Presbyterian minister in an Air Force town when he opposed the Iraq War in front of his congregation. Roughly seventy percent of the country supported the war at the time. The other thirty percent were not, as a rule, in the pews of churches within walking distance of an active base.

What that cost our family is not the point of this letter. What it taught me is.

You do not get to decide whether your principles will be popular. You get to decide whether you will keep them anyway. The cost is the cost. The name-calling and the vitriol and the conspiracy theories are the standard fee for refusing the room consensus offers you. You can choose not to pay, and most do. You cannot choose principles without the bill.

I do not believe Mr. Kennedy made that choice on Friday. I believe he made a different one, which he has every right to make, and which I am not equipped to follow him into.

What we were doing

I joined this campaign as Director of Content. For the better part of a year, my team and I produced 2.5 billion organic impressions with no paid media—a number I cite not to credential myself but to mark what was at stake. We built proof, every day, that a campaign organized around principles instead of party machinery could move attention at a scale the major parties have to spend hundreds of millions to match. We were the rough draft of a different operating model for American politics.

That model does not require Mr. Kennedy. It requires only the conviction that the two-party duopoly is not a fact of nature, and that the architecture of attention can be rebuilt for something other than tribal sorting.

The endorsement does not invalidate the rough draft. It only ends my participation in the version that had his name on it.

What I think happens next

I am going to be honest about what I am betting on, which means being honest about what I am betting against.

I am betting that the two-party system is the upstream cause of nearly every downstream pathology in American politics—groupthink, in-group purity, the stereotyping of opponents as evil, the illusion of moral invulnerability that makes terrible decisions feel righteous. The party is the structure. Personalities are downstream.

I am betting against the reflex to fix the personality and leave the structure alone. That is the reflex Mr. Kennedy followed on Friday—judging that the structure was too strong to oppose, and that supporting the more sympathetic of its two faces was the better move. I do not begrudge that judgment. I think it confirms the diagnosis it tries to evade.

There is a working alternative to the structure, and it is already running, modestly, in places like Alaska. Open primaries plus ranked-choice voting break the spoiler narrative—the single most effective rhetorical weapon the two-party system uses to discipline its critics. Where these reforms have passed, independents are no longer the saboteurs of one major-party victory or the other. They are candidates, full stop.

I am going to spend the next several years trying to pass these reforms in as many states as possible. The organization I am building toward this is called Independence Works. We will support grassroots ballot measures at the state level, with the immediate goal of putting open primaries and ranked-choice voting in front of voters everywhere we can credibly do so by 2026. The longer arc is to remove the structural impediments to a competitive independent presidential candidacy. I am not going to predict an outcome at that scale. I am going to do the work.

The honest part

I worked on a campaign whose principal endorsed the candidate the rest of our work had been organized against. That is, by any reasonable standard, a failure—mine as much as anyone’s. I do not get to disclaim it because I disagree with the final move.

What I get to do is take what I learned about how attention actually moves at scale and apply it to a structural project that does not depend on any single figure. That is the only honest forward move I can see.

I am not asking anyone to follow me into it. I am telling you what I am doing.

To the hundred thousand volunteers, staff, and donors who gave tirelessly to a campaign that abruptly ended: thank you. The proof of concept you helped build still stands. I hope the next version of it will not have one face.

To Mr. Kennedy: I am grateful for what you tried, and clear-eyed about what it became. I hope I am wrong about what comes next.

Peace to you all.

Jonathan Hiller