Army combat veteran and author Matt Cavanaugh on Tuesday launched an independent bid to challenge first-term Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank in Colorado’s 5th Congressional District, predicting that its voters are hungry for an alternative to what he termed the “broken two-party system.”

“I’m as unhappy with this same old, broken Washington as everybody else is, but if we keep nominating more of the same candidates, we’re going to get more of the same dysfunction,” the 46-year-old retired lieutenant colonel, West Point graduate and record-holding ultramarathon racer told Colorado Politics.

“When you set everything else aside, it really does get down to as simple as that,” Cavanaugh said. “I’ve fought for the country in different capacities my whole life, and I asked myself, what’s the best thing I could do for the country now? And this is it.”

Crank, a former political consultant and podcaster, won election last year by a comfortable margin following the retirement of former nine-term Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn.

He’s facing four Democratic challengers, including Jessica Killin, an Army veteran and former chief of staff for second gentleman Doug Emhoff. Killin raised more than $1 million in her first quarter in the race and finished the period with nearly as much in the bank as the incumbent.

Cavanaugh, who calls himself a “lifelong independent” — and once argued in an opinion column that uniformed members of the military shouldn’t vote in federal elections — said there’s no better place to “break us out of this sort of two-party doom loop we’re in” than the 5th CD, where 52% of registered voters don’t belong to any political party.

“Independent voters represent the majority in the district, and we’re fed up with Washington’s screw-ups and corruption. Because of the broken two-party system, Space Command’s gone, the government’s shut down (and) inflation, costs and political violence are all up,” Cavanaugh said in a statement.

“This is why nobody here wants anything to do with these extremist Republicans and Democrats. In a district where over half of us either wear a flag to work or love someone who does — it’s time for an Independent veteran to represent us in Congress,” he added.

Cavanaugh points to multiple trends to support his contention, including Republicans carrying the district by increasingly slimmer margins and Colorado Springs electing its first unaffiliated mayor in decades two years ago.

The 5th CD, with boundaries nearly coinciding with those of El Paso County, has never elected a Democrat to Congress, though the once-reliable GOP stronghold has moved away from Republicans faster than any other House district in the country in recent years, according an analysis to election returns.

While Crank defeated his Democratic opponent in 2024 by nearly 14 points, his margin was the lowest of any GOP nominee for the seat and amounted to less than half the margin Lamborn posted eight years earlier.

In 2023, Colorado Springs, the district’s largest city, elected an unaffiliated candidate as mayor when Nigerian immigrant and nonprofit director Yemi Mobolade defeated Republican Wayne Williams, a city council member and former Colorado secretary of state, by a 15-point margin.

In addition, a recent poll by Magellan Strategies, a GOP-aligned Colorado firm, found that 62% of 5th CD voters said they’d be open to voting for an independent or third-party candidate for Congress, with 29% saying they wouldn’t consider that option.

While independents currently hold two U.S. Senate seats — Vermont’s Bernie Sanders and Maine’s Angus King, who both caucus with the Democrats — the last time an independent candidate was elected to an initial term in the House was 1990, when Sanders won the first of his eight terms in that chamber before his election to the Senate. In recent decades, a handful of lawmakers dropped their affiliation and declared themselves independents while in office but didn’t stand for reelection.

“Folks aren’t happy with these choices — a career politician and a lobbyist and former senior Biden administration official,” Cavanaugh said, referring to Crank and Killin, who worked as a lead lobbyist for financial services company USAA before her recent job at the White House.

“You know, we’re not a Democrat district, we’re not a Republican district,” Cavanaugh said. “This is an independent district. I mean, I hate to put it in this sort of cute way, but this is the home of Team USA, so we’re not just red, we’re not just blue — we’re red, white and blue here.”

He said he’s got a firm answer to one question he’s been regularly asked while considering whether to run, whether he’s “really a Democrat in disguise or hiding your Republican background.”

The answer, he said, is neither.

“I’m one of those folks that drank the Kool Aid when I went to school at West Point, with both fists,” and chose to “deliberately abstain” from voting in federal elections while in uniform.

Cavanaugh added that he cast his first ballot in a presidential election in 2024, after retiring from a 25-year military career, though he won’t yet say which ticket got his vote.

He also wouldn’t say whether he’s decided to caucus with the Republicans or Democrats if he wins election, as independent members of Congress typically do.

“I will caucus in the best interest of the 5th Congressional District when we get to that moment of decision,” Cavanaugh said. “So I’m not going to sort of pick a side preemptively.”

Cavanaugh did, however, make clear his thoughts about the Republican-controlled House’s current leadership.

“What I will say is that the founders put us on a three-legged stool, but right now, two of those legs have been kicked out. Congress is not working. Our member of Congress, Rep. Jeff Crank, has been given directions by the speaker not to do public events in our community,” he said, referring to Crank’s decision at the urging of House GOP leaders to hold telephone town halls rather than in-person events open to the public.

“It’s as if, 250 years later, we’re right back to America’s oldest political problem,” Cavanaugh said. “We’re being taxed, but we’re not being represented, because our representative doesn’t talk to us in any meaningful way. So the one public pledge I would make is that Mike Johnson does not deserve to be the speaker of the House of Representatives. He’s already given his gavel over, and he does not believe in the independent strength of the Congress, that Congress has an appropriate role in this, in this federal government.”

Cavanaugh said he plans to hold a public event — the first of what he termed “scalable focus groups” across the district — on Nov. 8 at the Manitou Arts Center.

The recipient of two Bronze Stars and the Combat Action Badge for his service in Iraq, Cavanaugh co-founded the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and was named U.S. Army Athlete of the Year. His donation of a kidney to a stranger across the country in 2021 sparked what he describes as a chain of donations that saved another seven patients and led to his recent position serving as president and CEO of the National Kidney Donation Organization.

Cavanaugh holds the record as the fastest American to race the 4 Deserts Grand Slam ultramarathon series and won the race across Antarctica in 2022, after donating his kidney — in an attempt, he’s said, to demonstrate that kidney donation doesn’t hinder a donor’s future accomplishment. His forthcoming book about the experience, “Best Scar Wins: How You Can Be More Than You Were Before,” is due to be published in December.

Cavanaugh and his ex-wife both live in Manitou Springs, where they’re jointly raising their two daughters.