Will Staton has a theory about why nothing gets fixed in the United States of America. The two parties, he argues, have stopped trying to govern and try only to compete — to disagree — so that the system that was supposed to produce representation has instead produced a kind of permanent, profitable stalemate. Staton, a 40-year-old former K-12 educator from Mississippi who has lived in Syracuse since 2021, announced his independent bid for New York’s 22nd Congressional District in October 2025. He entered a race that already included Democratic incumbent John Mannion and three Republican challengers. Staton has no campaign staff, no scheduled events and no political experience. By any conventional measure, he is not supposed to be competitive.
Staton said he knows this, and he finds it clarifying.
“I know what I’m trying to do is different, but I would honestly rather lose this way than win that way, because I do think that game is broken,” Staton said. “I think it has failed my red friends, I think it has failed my blue friends, I think it has failed my friends, regardless of their identity, racial or ethnic, LGBT or not, it really doesn’t matter. I think the only people who are winning right now in this country are the people who already have everything, and that is a very, very small group of people.”
The 22nd Congressional District covers Syracuse, Oneida County and Madison County — including Hamilton, home to Colgate University — and is considered one of New York’s more competitive swing districts. Mannion flipped the seat in 2024 in one of the nation’s most closely-watched House races, and Mannion has already confirmed that he will seek reelection. The district’s politics land directly on Colgate’s doorstep, as decisions made in Washington about immigration enforcement, agricultural subsidies and federal education funding have concrete consequences for people who live and work in Hamilton.
When Staton visited Colgate on Friday, Feb. 27, he met with Associate Professor of Religion Jenna Reinbold, who co-directs the Heretics Club, a recently revived campus series dedicated to fostering civil discourse across ideological lines. The similarities between what the Heretics Club is trying to do in the basement of the Colgate Memorial Chapel and what Staton is trying to do in the U.S. Congress are not lost on them.
“Staton recognizes that there is an interest in creating more productive communication across political difference so that politicians and their constituents can more effectively work together,” Reinbold said.
“The key, as he knows, is getting people with different perspectives to listen to each other and figure out which issues they can work together on. I think this work is very important, and it’s part of what we’ve been aiming for with Heretics Club — providing a venue for people to hear each other out, to ask well-intentioned questions about important issues, and to try to find places of commonality among people’s differing perspectives.”
Staton also discussed scaling the kind of structured, good-faith disagreement espoused by the Heretics Club to the hundreds of thousands of constituents in NY-22 who have genuinely competing material interests.
“You can’t mandate leadership, but you can try to model it,” Staton said. “We need more people actually doing it publicly. We’re normalizing politicians talking about each other on social media instead of politicians talking to each other about important issues.”
After Staton left Mississippi at 16, he lived in New Hampshire, New York City, Washington, D.C. and now Syracuse, where he and his wife Katrina settled to be near her family when their first daughter was born. He holds a master’s degree in international relations and spent years working in K-12 education. His mother was a law school classmate and lifelong friend of Hillary Clinton — close enough that Clinton traveled to Mississippi to speak at his mother’s funeral in 2017, months after Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election. This relationship explains why the failures and possibilities of the federal government have occupied his imagination for almost two decades, and why Staton rejected the idea of starting lower on the ballot by running for a city council seat or a state assembly race, for example.
“As far as I’m concerned, the federal level is where the problem is,” Staton said. “If you look at [Pew Research Center] reporting, trust in local government is pretty healthy across the board, trust in state government is less healthy, but it’s still not awful — get to the federal level, and public trust just plummets. Less than a third of adults trust the federal government to do the right thing … if that’s where the problem is, I have got to try and be there to fix it.”
The two-party system, Staton believes, structurally incentivizes the wrong behaviors. Legislators who reach across the aisle face challenges in primary elections, and voters who might be persuadable are locked out of primaries dominated by the ideological extremes of each party. The result is a Congress that performs dysfunctionally, Staton said, and this is why he decided that 2026 was his year to run for Congress.
“I think the time feels right now, because the times actually feel very wrong,” Staton said. “My conclusion is that we have to do something fundamentally different if we want to reset the foundation for our democracy. And I don’t think that either of these two groups have what it takes to do that. I’m not even sure that they’re interested sometimes, which is sad.”
Staton’s platform includes an “equality tax” on accumulated wealth above $100 million, small business tax incentives in place of corporate loopholes, universal pre-K, paid parental leave, immigration reform that pairs pathways to citizenship with humane border enforcement, term limits and the abolition of gerrymandering.
Most of these positions align closely with mainstream Democratic ones, but he believes the problem is less about what Democrats believe than about what the system prevents anyone from doing.
Senior Sophia Ceconi has worked for Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut for the past two summers, respectively. She said the structural obstacles for an independent in Congress are significant.
“Congress is practically run entirely through party infrastructure. Committee assignments are controlled by party caucuses, and there is no Independent Caucus to advocate for this type of candidate,” Ceconi said. “Seats on extremely important and prestigious committees go to members who are buddy-buddy with leadership. Passing bills and getting co-sponsorship could also be a challenge. For a district like NY-22 with genuine economic needs, being shut out of relevant committees like Agriculture or Transportation could pose a real issue.”
Still, Ceconi was not dismissive of Staton’s candidacy — rather, she expressed a measure of hope.
“It really depends on the candidate, their reputation, their networking ability and their drive to make a difference. As someone who has worked for the Ranking Members of the Appropriations Committee and the Intelligence Committee, I have seen bipartisan work succeed,” Ceconi said. “ An independent candidate makes sense for the demographic of constituents in NY-22 and, with the right strategies, I think being an independent could be favorable in some cases, especially when working in a bipartisan manner.”
For Madison County specifically, Staton said reinvigorating small and local agriculture would be a priority, moving federal incentives away from large industrial farming operations and toward smaller farms that could strengthen local food systems. The district’s rural communities — Hamilton, Cazenovia and the farmland that surrounds them — depend on a small-farming economy that he argues has been neglected in favor of industrial-scale operations.
“It would be great if we could empower smaller farmers in places like this to scale up, not to become huge, but to do more than just subsist,” Staton said.
On corporate mega-deals, his position is more nuanced. He does not want to eliminate them and stops short of opposing the Micron semiconductor facility planned for Clay, in neighboring Onondaga County. To him, it depends on whether the tax incentives that governments cede are worth the jobs and economic activity that result from them.
One of the sharpest local angles in Staton’s campaign involves Madison County Sheriff Todd Hood’s agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Hood signed a 287(g) memorandum of agreement with ICE in June 2025, authorizing local deputies to execute immigration warrants — a decision he made without consulting the Madison County Board of Supervisors. The agreement led to a write-in campaign from Nancy Ries, a Colgate professor emerita, who ran against Hood in November’s election with no advertising budget and received a surprising 1,510 write-in votes. Hood won reelection with 7,486 votes. Staton had a direct message for the Madison County residents who wrote in Ries’s name on their ballots.
“Good for y’all,” Staton said. “In no even reasonably free country anywhere in the world would you see masked, armed agents patrolling the streets. That’s not what freedom looks like … Local law enforcement should focus on doing their job, which is to enforce local laws. They are not federal agents. I don’t see that they have any role to play in immigration enforcement more broadly speaking.”
Staton’s campaign confronts its most immediate structural obstacle with access to the ballot. His window to collect signatures opens in April, which is after the Democratic and Republican windows have already begun. This means that some residents who might support him will have already signed a party petition and will be ineligible to sign his. He needs 3,500 valid signatures, while his Democratic and Republican opponents need 1,500 each.
Staton is asking Colgate students to help with signatures, volunteering and any form of the kind of civic engagement that the Ries campaign demonstrated was possible even from an unlikely starting point. He responds personally to every volunteer inquiry through his website because he has no staff to do it for him.
Whether or not the campaign succeeds by conventional measures — winning — Staton has begun thinking of it as part of a larger national network of independent candidates who are gradually building a shared infrastructure.
“If I’m not victorious, hopefully I can keep pushing the needle in other ways. I have been really excited the last few months because I have started connecting with other independent candidates around the country. I would call it a nascent and grassroots movement, but there is a real and growing movement, and we’re starting to talk to each other,” Staton said.
In other words, Staton is hoping that his message is enough to matter, even if it is not yet enough to win.
“I have good friends — people who I say I love you to — who vote red and vote Republican … I got good friends — people I say I love you to — who vote blue and Democrat, and they’re all dealing with the same problems. They all struggle with the same things,” Staton said. “I came into this believing I’m the only person who has a real message … That’s what gives me a true puncher’s chance.”
