Why I'm running as an independent

I grew up Republican, served in the legislature as a Democrat, and walked away from both. Here's who I am, what I believe, and what I'm running to do.

How I became an independent

I’m Todd Achilles. I grew up a 4-H farm kid, I served as a tank commander and armor officer in the U.S. Army, and I spent more than two decades building and leading teams in the tech industry. Today I’m running for the United States Senate as an independent.

This is the first post on our Substack, and I want to use this as a reflection of myself so you can learn who I am, where I come from, and why a guy who’s worn a lot of different labels in his life has come to understand that the most honest one is “independent.”

Over the coming weeks my team and I will be writing here about the economy, about the public lands we grew up on, about what has happened to Congress, and about what we can actually get done if Idaho sends an independent to the Senate.

But the right place to start is the question I get more than any other, from Republicans and Democrats alike: “What happened, and which side are you really on?” Let me try to answer it plainly.

Raised a Republican

I came up in a Republican household where the values were pretty simple: you worked hard, you paid your own way, you didn’t expect the government to run your life, and you took the Constitution seriously. I still believe in these values. That’s why I was a registered Republican in Idaho for a lot longer than I was ever a Democrat. The values I was raised with are also why at 19 years old I raised my right hand to join the Army and spent my 20s as a tank commander leading troops overseas. I swore an oath to the Constitution that knows no partisanship. I swore to defend the liberties of others. And I swore to keep my country and my fellow Americans safe.

These are principles I still believe in. And I think most Idahoans believe in them too. As time has gone by, I’ve come to see that neither party genuinely supports the principles I was raised to believe. And that, in short, is why I’m an independent.

Why the Republican Party lost me

I held Republicans to the highest standard because they were the first party that I thought shared my values. I watched the GOP in Washington, D.C. walk away from the fiscal conservatism it once preached. Every time Republicans held the White House the national debt went up instead of down, and the same people who lectured the rest of us about living within our means kept quietly handing the bill to the next generation.

I watched the party that calls itself the party of small government and individual liberty go looking for new ways to insert itself into individual decisions that ought to be left to Idahoans and their families. You can be the party of freedom, or you can be the party that polices how people live their own lives, but you can’t honestly be both. Too many Republicans in D.C. seem to have forgotten what they once stood for. They’re pretending that they can support individual liberties at the same time as government overreach, and they claim to stand for free market capitalism while bending over backwards to support corporate socialism. I reached the point where I just couldn’t take it anymore.

Why I became a Democrat

When that point hit, I figured that if I could no longer call myself a Republican, that meant I had to be a Democrat. It’s a two-party system, right?

Our economy has failed far too many working people for far too long. I believed then, and I believe now, that we have to break up the corporate monopolies that underpay their workers and deny them benefits, crush smaller competitors, and choke off the innovation that made this country great. We have to end the corporate welfare that lets Wall Street hoard its profits while sticking the public with the losses, and we have to make our markets genuinely free again. I thought believing all this made me a Democrat. But just as believing in small government, fiscal responsibility, and individual freedom didn’t make me a Republican, I would later come to learn that believing in a fair market economy and non-interference in people’s personal lives didn’t make me a Democrat.

What the legislature taught me

Then I raised my hand again - this time to serve in the legislature. At first I tried to be a “good Democrat.” Being a “good Democrat” meant sticking with the party’s positions and not talking to the other side of the aisle. Naturally it didn’t take me long to realize that being a good Democrat can get in the way of being a good legislator. By focusing on being a good Democrat, I wasn’t doing good service for my constituents. I wasn’t fulfilling my purpose as an elected leader. As a former soldier and a proud American, failure to do my duty and serve properly was not acceptable.

So, I changed.

I did the thing that apparently counts as “radical” now. I started talking to my Republican colleagues, and I found out we agreed on a lot more than either party wanted to admit. We didn’t have to agree on everything. We just had to agree on the bill in front of us.

That’s how I worked with some of the most conservative, anti-monopoly Republicans in the legislature to kill a bill that would have shielded Bayer from the glyphosate lawsuits it has rightly earned, and it’s how I worked with my moderate Republican colleagues to protect public education and invest in our infrastructure. I learned that the best legislators are the ones who put policy before politics. This is a vital part of putting service before self. The lesson stuck with me, and I’ll carry it for as long as I live.

Why I left the Democrats

While I was doing that work, the national Democratic Party was apparently working hard to give me every reason to leave it. I watched a party that claims to speak for working people keep writing off rural communities and small states like ours as not worth the trouble, as if Idahoans’ votes weren’t worth the effort of winning - as if we didn’t deserve a real fight for our votes. I watched that same party spend months digging in behind a Joe Biden reelection campaign that much of the country could already see was a mistake, only to scramble to swap him out at the last minute. I could not support a party that refused to face what was obvious until it was almost too late.

After the loss, I watched its leadership spend the better part of a year sitting on the post-election autopsy, despite having promised to release it, then eventually putting it out only after immense pressure and in a half-finished form that the party’s own chairman refused to stand behind. In the Army we call that an after-action review, and you either do it honestly or you don’t do it at all, because the entire point is to keep your people from making the same fatal mistake twice. A party that is unwilling to take a hard look at and learn the lessons of its past failures absolutely does not deserve the faith or votes of its supporters. I had already left by the time the report finally came out. But boy did it make me glad to be gone.

Why I’m running as an independent

So here’s where I landed after all of it: the real divide in this country isn’t left versus right, it’s top versus bottom. An economy and political system that no longer rewards good ideas and hard work is a recipe for the failures we are seeing. Our farmers, teachers, truckers, nurses, hairdressers, small business owners, and everyone pulling a double shift just to make rent - these are the people doing the work that our economy depends on, and these are the people for whom our economy isn’t working. These are the people who deserve to have a country that works for them. These are the people I’m running to serve.

Right now we have a system that auctions America off piece by piece, to the biggest donors in D.C. Both parties have a hand on that gavel, and I’m not interested in joining either side of the bidding. I’m here to represent Idaho.

The fact of the matter is that every problem in this country today is one that the two-party system has either caused - or failed to solve. Neither party can be trusted to suddenly start being the solution. When I was 19 years old I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and every veteran knows that that oath has no expiration date. I’ve never understood people who put party before country. Party before duty. Party before principle. Americans trust the military because it is the finest non-partisan institution in this country. We did hard things alongside a random group of fellow soldiers. We veterans know how to work with anyone.

So I’m not asking you to trust a party, and I’m not asking you to take my word for anything. I’m asking you to look at the work I have done and the principles I stand on, and to decide for yourself. I think a lot of Idahoans are in the same place I am right now - tired of being told we have to pick a team before anything else, and that that team matters more than anything else. I think we want representatives who will actually - and I know this sounds crazy, but bear with me - represent us. Who will do the job they are elected to do and serve our interests - not their own, not their party’s, and not their lobbyists’. This is the job I’m asking to do, and it’s why I’m running as an independent.

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If you want to help prove an independent can win in Idaho, you can chip in here.

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Paid for by Todd Achilles for Idaho / J. Patrick Riceci, Treasurer. Copyright (C) 2026 Achilles for Idaho. All rights reserved.

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