On election night, following his decisive loss in Congressional District 2, state Sen. Brenton Awa said voters had stuck with their parties. Three days later, he quit his.
Awa was one of the Hawai‘i Republican Party’s most promising candidates. A former KITV anchor and reporter, he unseated Democratic Sen. Gil Riviere in 2022, won reelection in 2024 and became Senate minority leader. Along the way he built a real following, with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, and a reputation for both candor and controversy.
Awa’s say-it-like-it-is approach plays a little like a Hawai‘i-specific version of the Trump-style that Republicans have adopted nationally. In 2023, he told a Hawaiian cultural leader she would have been hanged for not supporting a Hawaiian and refused to apologize. In his first speech as minority leader, a joke about “mahus” drew criticism from some trans rights advocates.
Yet much of that speech centered on the economic factors causing Hawai‘i residents to move away. Awa said, “our government solution to housing has been for us to move out of state,” and promised his caucus would “resist all decisions that force locals to leave.”
He has kept that focus since his first campaign, and his message resonates because he says what many local families feel. Even a health educator who condemned the mahu line said that he agrees with Awa on many issues affecting Native Hawaiians, and Civil Beat’s Sunshine Blog, which called the speech’s remarks incendiary, said he was trying to make important points about the cost of living.
His frustration with how leaders deliver for local families is what brought Awa to the Republican Party in the first place. When he first ran in 2022, he said he couldn’t bring himself to run as a Democrat because he believed the party had let corruption fester, criticizing deals struck behind closed doors and state agencies that weren’t listening to people in his district.
In October, Pāʻele Kiakona, who is the first Green Party candidate elected to the Hawaiʻi Legislature, expressed a similar frustration. He told me that after the Lahaina fire, legislators signed a Lahaina Strong pledge and took a picture with the group, then voted against what they had pledged to support. “People are going to another party because they don’t see the progress that they would hope to see,” he said.
Running as an anti-establishment Democrat, a Republican or a third-party candidate are three routes to challenge the status quo. Now, Awa is trying a fourth. On election night, after he lost his race for Congress, he told HPR he was thinking of leaving the GOP because Hawaiʻi voters were reluctant to back anyone with an “R” next to their name and that his push to bring local values to the party hadn’t won it more votes. On Nov. 6, he resigned from the party to become an independent.
Serving as an independent in the Legislature is logistically straightforward. Between leaving the Republican Party and joining the Democratic caucus in 2017, I was a temporary independent, and the system adapted well. I kept my committee assignments and floor vote. The only real inconvenience: without a caucus, I had to use public bathrooms farther from the House floor.
Winning reelection as an independent is another matter entirely. Reaching the ballot is simple, since a legislative candidate needs only 15 signatures. The problem is getting out of the primary. Under state law, a nonpartisan candidate advances only with 10% of all the votes cast for the office, or as many votes as the weakest party nominee received.
When I first ran as a Republican, I gave similar reasons, feeling that the party in power was ignoring the economic struggles facing our community during the Great Recession. I believed the Republican Party might pay attention to my community. Later, I realized there were dissident Democrats who wanted the same changes I did and found my values actually matched theirs more closely.
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That 10% sounds low until you look at our primary ballot. A voter can choose one party’s ballot or the nonpartisan one. If a voter chooses an independent candidate for state Senate and votes in the Democratic race for governor, their ballot isn’t counted. So a vote for an independent costs a voter every partisan race.
For Awa, that means winning roughly 900 votes from people willing to skip the often more competitive partisan primaries in top ticket races. In this year’s primary, only 1.84% of voters chose the nonpartisan ballot, and a nonpartisan legislative candidate hasn’t reached 10% since at least 2010.
No other state works this way. In 44 states, an independent candidate for the Legislature goes straight onto the November ballot, usually by gathering signatures, and five more put every candidate on one primary ballot. Hawaiʻi is the only state that keeps party primaries and still makes independents run in them with a required threshold to advance.
Under these current rules, Awa’s only viable path is a nonpartisan post such as Honolulu City Council or mayor. Honolulu uses a top-two runoff system, which allowed Mayor Rick Blangiardi to win as an independent in 2020.
Awa appears interested. On election night, he said he would likely consider a mayoral run. Beyond City Hall, however, independents have few options, since the Legislature, governor and Congress all run through party primaries.
If Hawaiʻi wanted to change that, the Legislature has two clear models to consider. The first is what most states do: let independents petition onto the November ballot. Even if the signature requirement is higher, it’s still fairer than forcing candidates to choose a party, start a new one, or ask voters to skip other partisan races. And, asking for community support is a great way to vet candidates.
The second is changing the primary itself, so every candidate runs on one ballot. Alaska sends the top four to November, where voters rank them, and five of the 40 members of its House were independents going into this month’s election. Honolulu voters rejected ranked-choice voting this month, but the Legislature could (and should) still take it up.
The Legislature has already looked at a simpler version. Senate Bill 2480, which Awa voted for in committee this year, would send the top two to November and repeal the 10% bar, though it was sent back to committee and died there. In California, the top-two system has elected at least one independent candidate. Chad Mayes won reelection to the Assembly in 2020 with no party preference.
That said, small parties opposed the bill. The Libertarian Party of Hawai‘i testified that “Libertarians and other non-dominant voices would routinely be eliminated in the primary round.” I’d argue that Kiakona is a great example of why a good candidate with community support could benefit from an all-party primary system. While he received 181 votes on the Green primary ballot, he received 3,025 in November. On one ballot where voters can split their tickets, a candidate like him would likely do far better in the primary than our system allows now.
So, when the Legislature seats two members who belong to neither major party in January, we should remember how they got there. One left his party, and the other ran a third-party campaign. Neither got there the way an independent candidate would have to, and that’s worth fixing.
