Hello there, happy Wednesday and welcome to another episode of the Chuck Toddcast.

Today's is somewhat a thematic day. Most Wednesdays, I'm trying to be in the habit of doing

a little bit of updating of what I'm seeing on the campaign trail. And frankly, my campaign

notebook has been overflowing with things.

And it matches up really well with who my guests, plural, are today.

I have a joint interview today with two candidates for the U.S. Senate.

One is running as an independent in South Dakota and another is running as an independent in Idaho.

It's Brian Bangs and Todd Achilles.

They've both run for office previously as Democrats and basically have decided the

Democratic brand makes it impossible for them to have a conversation with voters.

You'll hear better letting them describe their attempts at doing this.

Both of them, I think, do feel they've always been independent and only picked aside to run for office because of the so-called doopoly.

And in this case, this cycle we've seen, and they're working pretty closely with Dan Osborne, who was a pretty

successful independent candidate in Nebraska last cycle. He ended up getting over 40%. Now, he benefited

from the fact that the Democratic Party in Nebraska essentially took a knee, right, didn't really

compete. And that's obviously what these two

independent candidates in Idaho, where Jim Rish is the nominee, that's who Todd Achilles is running

against, and Brian Bangs is running against Mike Rounds, a Republican senator there. Now, I think they both

it's, it's, I think it really goes to underscore sort of the brand problem the Democratic

party has in Red America, that even though there is, you know, and both of them will argue that

there is, there is a, there is, you know, there is a mainstream middle in all of these places.

It's just that the Democratic brand, particularly in Red America, where there's only been essentially one side competing, one side branding.

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