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Indiana isn’t supposed to be where the independent movement breaks through. It’s a deep-red state, 41st in voter turnout, where 95% of the legislature is effectively decided in May primaries by a sliver of the electorate. That’s exactly why Greg Ballard — Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel, two-term Republican mayor of Indianapolis, and now independent candidate for Secretary of State — is running. Paul Rieckhoff sits down with Ballard a few weeks out from Election Day to talk about why he walked away from the GOP, what it cost him to even get his name on the ballot, and why this race matters far beyond Hoosier country.

Donald Trump is in full spray-and-pray mode. One day he’s threatening Iran and Cuba, the next he’s cutting a diesel deal with the Kremlin and backstabbing Ukraine again. Vladimir Putin ignored Trump’s latest ceasefire within hours, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board noticed. Most Americans and most American veterans still stand with Ukraine. The president does not speak for them. In this media blitz episode, Paul Rieckhoff joins Alicia Menendez and veteran national security reporter David Rhode to name what’s actually happening: Zelensky is emerging as the real leader of the free world while the American president plays political bandwagon.

Trump floated the idea that Ukraine needs a new president because Zelensky keeps hitting Russian oil refineries and that’s driving fuel prices up. Paul Rieckhoff flips the frame: Ukraine doesn’t need a new president — America does. From a creek in the Catskills, with his boys skipping rocks in the background, Paul lays out why the most important story in the world is still that Donald Trump commands the most powerful military ever built and nothing — not the courts, not the Democrats, not even a Congressional majority — is currently positioned to stop him. This is a solo episode, raw and unvarnished, built for the stretch of political dread between now and the next election.

Texas is still red. But Ken Paxton is a scandal-plagued candidate standing on that stage only because Donald Trump put him there — and Trump knows it. With a forever war in Iran dragging on, home heating oil hitting six dollars a gallon in the northeast, and a barrel of crude at $105, Republicans are watching their own base turn on them. Paul Rieckhoff joins Katie Phang alongside The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire and Lincoln Project strategist Stuart Stevens to pull apart a Senate race Trump personally owns, the 1.7 million Texas veterans and 16% independents who could decide it, and the quiet administration debate about whether to launch another Iran strike before voters go to the polls.

Paul Rieckhoff walks his kids to their public school on primary day in New York City — and has to explain to his seven-year-old why Dad, an Iraq veteran and 9/11 first responder, isn’t allowed to vote. That’s the story behind the Let Vets Vote lawsuit, and in this crossover special with the Independent Voter Podcast from IVN.US, Paul sits down with Chad and Sean to lay out the full strategy. One million veterans in New York City locked out. Sixteen fully closed primary states. Public resources funding private party elections where the real winners are chosen before November even arrives. The players, as Paul puts it, are also serving as the referee — and it’s time to end it.

Adam Kinzinger is back. The former GOP congressman, Air National Guard lieutenant colonel, January 6th committee member, and founder of Country First sits down with Paul to answer the question nobody in corporate media wants to touch head-on: will Donald Trump attack the 2026 elections, and if he does, what will it actually look like? Kinzinger lays out why a blowout is the best defense against an authoritarian steal, where the real danger lives — the margins, the close races, the House deciding who it seats — and why the two-thirds of Republicans who are not ride-or-die with Trump are finally starting to speak up.

Pete Hegseth wasn’t on the USS Abraham Lincoln when sailors were stuck at sea for more than a year, running short on rations, reporting suicide attempts, and watching supply bases get taken out by drone strikes. He showed up for the homecoming photo op. Paul Rieckhoff joins Connell McShane at News Nation to call it exactly what it is — a 2028 presidential campaign being run out of the Pentagon, with internal camps already forming around JD Vance and Dan Driscoll on one side and Hegseth loyalists on the other. The only person in close November races people are running away from faster than Trump is Hegseth himself.

President Mayhem is off the rails, and he’s getting more desperate by the day. On this WTF Wednesday edition of Independent Americans, Paul Rieckhoff breaks down Trump’s unhinged Iran remarks — publicly suggesting it would be “a very small price to pay” to let Iran take out Los Angeles and San Diego — and why that kind of talk about American cities can never be normalized, no matter how numb we’ve become. This is what reckless, unchecked executive power sounds like out loud.

Trump is retreating to friendly turf while the ground shifts under the whole rigged two-party system. Paul Rieckhoff takes you inside a Media Blitz week — a CNN hit with Erin Burnett and a News Nation sit-down with Chris Cuomo and independent Senate candidate Seth Bodnar — to lay out what the polls, the propaganda machine, and the president’s travel schedule are actually telling us one month out from the biggest election of our lifetime. GOP senators are quietly comparing 2026 to the 2006 wipeout. Internal numbers are worse than public ones. And Trump’s approval with independents has fallen into single digits, a floor almost no modern president has touched.