Politics in America moves like a pendulum. The country swings left until people grow tired of the left’s excesses, then swings right until people grow tired of the right’s failure to deliver on the mandate they were given. Then it swings back. Nevadans have lived this cycle for decades — and most of us have played the same role in it every time: the tiebreaker, never the driver.

Here’s how it usually works. An incumbent or an incumbent party overreaches, or simply fails to follow through. Voters get fed up. But instead of voting for something, most frustrated voters do one of two things: they vote for whichever major party is out of power, just to punish the one that’s in it — or they vote for a minor-party or independent candidate as a protest, effectively “siphoning” votes away from the incumbent without ever putting their own preferred candidate in office. Either way, the result is the same. The pendulum swings. Nothing changes except which party’s turn it is to disappoint everyone.

Nevada Has Reached a Tipping Point

For the first time, Nevada’s independent and nonpartisan voters are not a fringe. According to the Nevada Secretary of State’s own registration data, nonpartisan voters now make up roughly 39% of the state’s active registered voters — more than either major party holds on its own. Democrats sit around 27%. Republicans sit around 27%. Nonpartisans are the largest bloc in the state, and it isn’t close.

Add in Nevada’s registered third parties — including the Independent American Party — and voters who have deliberately stepped outside the two-party system now represent a clear plurality of the Nevada electorate. That is not a protest vote anymore. That is a governing coalition waiting to happen, if independents choose to use it — starting with the 2026 IAP Nevada ticket.

The Old Habit: Voting for the Lesser of Two Evils

Most independents didn’t choose to be independent because they don’t care. They chose it because neither party fully represents them — and for years, the only realistic move was to hold your nose and pick the major-party candidate who seemed like the smaller problem. That habit is understandable. It’s also self-defeating. When you vote for the lesser of two evils, you still get evil — just a slightly different flavor of it, term after term, while the underlying dysfunction never gets addressed.

Every time an independent voter uses their vote purely to punish an incumbent — rather than to elect someone who actually represents their views — the message sent to Carson City and to Washington is the same: “the other team should be in charge instead.” Nobody hears “give us competent, independent leadership.” The pendulum swings, but the choices on offer never expand.

What Changes When Independents Vote Independent

Nevada’s independents now have the numbers to change what that message says. Instead of a protest vote for a major-party challenger, or a symbolic vote for a third-party candidate who “can’t win,” a unified nonpartisan and independent electorate has the actual power to elect one of its own — and to prove that independent government is not a wasted vote, but a winning one.

That’s the case I’m making for Nevada Secretary of State. Not as a spoiler pulling votes from one side or the other, but as the candidate independents can vote for — someone with two decades as a Nevada civil litigation paralegal and two decades as a computer systems analyst, whose entire career has been about solving problems, not scoring partisan points. Nevada’s next Secretary of State should answer to Nevada voters, not to a national party apparatus or a partisan association of secretaries of state.

Results, Not Noise

The pendulum has swung left, then right, then left again for as long as most of us have been voting — and each swing has been powered in part by independents voting against something instead of for something. Nevada’s independents are no longer a rounding error in that equation. At 39% of the electorate and growing, we are the deciding force in this state, whether we act like it or not.

It’s time to stop being the hinge the pendulum swings on, and start being the hand that stops it. Vote independent. Vote for a candidate who answers to you.

Brad Lee Barnhill is #YourIndependentVoice for Nevada Secretary of State