Democrats gave up their own Senate nominations in three states this summer. In Idaho, Nebraska and South Dakota, the party’s candidate quit so an independent could face the Republican one on one, and in each case that independent had worn a uniform. Add Montana, where the Democrat refused to go, and there are four veteran independent Senate candidates on the ballot in November. We went looking for how the party’s biggest veterans’ group had sorted them. The answer is stranger than we expected.

VoteVets lists six Senate endorsements for this cycle. Five are sitting senators: Tammy Duckworth, Gary Peters, Jack Reed, Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego. The sixth is Seth Bodnar, who is not a Democrat and has never held office.

Bodnar went to West Point and took a Rhodes Scholarship. After roughly ten years in uniform, including the 101st Airborne and Army Special Forces, he ran the University of Montana for eight years before resigning to run. VoteVets announced for him on 24 July. Senior Advisor Paul Eaton framed it as a calculation about who could win rather than a judgment about who had served.

That framing is doing a lot of work, because Alani Bankhead is also a veteran. She spent 21 years in the Air Force and retired as a lieutenant colonel, with assignments in counterintelligence, special operations and security. She won the Democratic primary in June with 43.7 percent. That was roughly 12,000 votes clear of her nearest rival, helped by more than $2.5 million in outside spending. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has said she has no viable path. Seventeen Democratic state legislators asked her to sit down with Bodnar and work something out. Carol Williams, a former state Senate Majority Leader, wrote to party leaders and donors asking them to talk Bankhead out of the race. She founded a group that recruits women candidates.

Bankhead told the Daily Montanan that the endorsements she cares about are the 48,772 votes Montanans already cast for her. So she stayed in. Bodnar’s own campaign polling had him level with Alme head to head and 15 points down with her on the ballot, which is the race he now has.

Dan Osborn served in the Navy aboard the Constellation and later in the Army National Guard in three states. He is an industrial mechanic who led an eleven-week strike at an Omaha cereal plant. About 500 workers walked out. He is not on the VoteVets list. Neither is Brian Bengs, who served in both the Navy and the Air Force and retired a lieutenant colonel. Todd Achilles, who served in the Army from 1992 to 1995, does appear, but under local offices, for an Idaho state House seat he no longer holds. His Senate campaign is absent.

But set that against the electability reasoning and it doesn’t add up. Analysts rate Osborn as the independent with the best chance of any of them. An Impact Research poll of 600 likely Nebraska voters, taken between 9 and 13 August, had him tied with Pete Ricketts at 47 apiece. Its margin of error was four points, so that is a tie within the noise. His favorability sat four points net positive while Ricketts was ten points underwater, and among independents Osborn led 67 to 25. Other trackers still show Ricketts ahead by mid single digits, prediction markets give the Republican roughly a 70 percent chance, and both Cook and Sabato call it Likely Republican. So the picture is a competitive race rather than a likely upset. It’s still the most competitive of the four.

Osborn has done this before, and the 2024 numbers are the best evidence anyone has for the whole approach. He lost to Deb Fischer by about seven points while Kamala Harris lost Nebraska by 21, and he held Fischer to 53 percent on a ballot where Donald Trump took 59. That was the worst showing by a Nebraska Republican since Ben Nelson last won the state twenty years ago.

Even so, the other two are further back. Rounds had $2.7 million in the bank at the end of June against $51,000 for Bengs, and Republicans have not lost a South Dakota Senate race since 2008. Idaho is harder to read, since the only numbers available are internals: Risch’s campaign put him 34 points up, Achilles’s campaign put the gap at four and had its own candidate five ahead once respondents heard more about both men. A 38-point spread between two partisan polls tells you nothing except that neither side wants to release a neutral one.

If you ask the four of them why they dropped the party, then the answers converge. Bengs told the outlet IVN in June that the obstacle in South Dakota was the label rather than the candidate. But he has evidence, because he ran as a Democrat against John Thune in 2022 and finished on 26.1 percent, a 44-point loss. Same man, same state, different word next to his name.

Achilles has moved twice. He was a Republican until 2024, then a Democrat, then an independent from 2025. So he sat in the Idaho House as a Democrat for seventeen months. And now he wants the Senate without a party.

The most telling comment came from someone not on any ballot. Jon Tester held a Montana Senate seat as a Democrat for eighteen years. He backed Bodnar’s independent run, and in a text message that later leaked he described his own party as poison to a campaign in that state. Tester is not a strategist making a tactical point. Rather, he is the last Democrat who actually won there.

Republicans have noticed and are not playing along. Rounds told NBC News that Beaudion quitting changed nothing about his plans. His reasoning was that Bengs is a Democrat whatever the ballot says. Beaudion, for his part, insisted he had not withdrawn to help the independent at all. Nebraska Democrats went further and endorsed Osborn outright.

This site argues that a service record buys Democratic candidates something they cannot get any other way. These four races are the cleanest test of that claim available in 2026, and the test is not going well.

Start with what the party itself did. Three state parties concluded that their own nominee was worth less than an independent with the same biography. CNN described those decisions as a blunt admission of how toxic the Democratic label has become in country that used to elect Democrats routinely. That is a claim about the label, not about the uniform. If service were the asset we say it is, a veteran Democrat should have been able to run and be heard. In Idaho, Nebraska and South Dakota nobody believed that, including the Democrats.

Then there is VoteVets. The organization exists to elect veterans. When it had to choose between a 21-year Air Force officer and a former Green Beret running without a party, it chose on electability. We think that was probably the right call on the merits. It is also an admission from the people who market military service hardest that the record is not what decides these races.

The Republicans have supplied the sharpest version of the counterargument. The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s press secretary told NOTUS that Osborn, Bengs, Achilles and Bodnar would all work in lockstep with what she called the toxic socialist Democrats. If the party label is the liability, dropping it doesn’t help much when your opponent hands it back to you in every advertisement. Ricketts has already spent close to $3 million making that case in Nebraska.

And the approach has never actually worked. CNN’s review found no federal race where a cleared field has carried an independent over the line, though it also found that Republicans posted some of their weakest Senate results in the states where it was tried. That’s the honest summary: this reliably makes red states closer and hasn’t yet flipped one.

Nebraska is the one to watch, because it is the only one of the four where a win is a live possibility rather than a hope. If Osborn takes it, the model stops being a way to make red states respectable and becomes a route to actual seats, and Osborn has already said he expects people to copy it in 2028 and beyond. If he loses narrowly again, the party has spent two cycles proving it can get close in Nebraska without getting a senator.

Montana will settle a smaller question. Bodnar’s own numbers say he beats Alme in a two-way race and loses by 15 in the race he actually has. If that holds, clearing the field is the whole mechanism. Endorsements without a cleared field buy very little. We were wrong about one thing going in, and it’s worth saying plainly. We assumed VoteVets was withholding from independents on principle. It isn’t. It endorsed one, skipped three, and told us the criterion was who could win.