"The red team fights the blue team, and the blue team fights the red team. That's their job. I don't turn to the Bloods or the Crips for answers to moral questions, so why would I turn to either American Political Party for the same?"

– Dakota Schuck, while campaigning in 2025

The word "independent" has a couple different meanings in a couple different contexts. I want to explore them both today, and see where they overlap.

I gave out buttons during my November 2025 City Council campaign which proudly displayed my slogan: "More Good. Less Bad." This pair of incomplete sentences is what I've turned to for years when asked about my political allegiances. It started partly as a joke, an absurdity of reduction to the most fundamental principles, but not everything that's funny lacks seriousness.

I don't abide party politics, especially when faced with the false-dichotomy of a two-party system. There are simply too many questions to have all the answers bundled into just two options. I usually disagree with one side more, but I disagree with both often. And even where I do fall fully into party lines, I do so because myself and the party both arrived at the same conclusions. Powerful groups are allowed to agree with me, afterall.

The accepted political term for lack of party affiliation is "independent". This word is also used as a bit of technical jargon in one of my favorite fields of study: Statistics.

Variable X is considered independent of Variable Y if a change in X doesn't suggest a change in Y. An example of two variables which are dependent (the opposite of independent) are a person's height and weight. As someone's height increases, it is likely that their weight will go up as well. It's not a perfect correlation, there are tall thin people and short hefty people, but the overall trend is that these two variables go up and down together. Independence, in contrast, is when knowing X doesn't tell you anything about Y. Height and quality of singing voice are independent variables. The color of a car and how fast it goes are independent variables. The pros and cons of a choice are often independent.

When faced with a choice, personally or politically, I ask myself "Does this option increase the good?" and I ask myself "Does this decrease the bad?". The answers to both of these questions are important, because there are many cases where a choice does good, but also has unwanted side effects.

A headache is bad. When things hurt, we want to decrease that hurt. Let's consider two options for getting rid of the headache: A) Take some aspirin, or B) Amputate. Option A is clearly better, right?

Option A, taking some aspirin, decreases the bad and doesn't have much impact on the good. Option B, on the other hand, decreases the bad (the headache is indeed gone), but it also decreases the good (decapitation is known to get in the way of a happy healthy life).

The answers to these two questions are often independent of one another. Just because a choice is good doesn't mean it isn't also bad (side effects). Just because a choice saves us from some bad doesn't mean it increases the good (out of the frying pan, into the fire).

When I say I'm running as an independent, I mean that I'm not beholden to a specific party. I also mean that I apply this analysis to every question. Sometimes political parties have great ideas, and I'm all for those ideas. But often they are only asking themselves if their answer leads to more good, or to less bad, but don't ask themselves both questions at the same time.

My political ideology is that it's always necessary to ask both questions, and to always be open to the possibility that the answers to each are independent of the other.