The Pragmatists: A New American Political Party, Founded on the Nation's 250th Birthday

The Pragmatist National Committee ("PNC") today announced the founding of the Pragmatists, a new American political party — launched deliberately on the nation's 250th birthday, and open to every American who wants government judged by results.

On July 4, 1776, Americans staked a country on a premise: that people can govern themselves. The Pragmatists are founded on the claim that the premise still holds — and that the parties built up around it have, over two and a half centuries, come to serve mostly themselves.

"We didn't start a party because America is broken. We started one to make sure the next 250 years are even better than the first," said Chris Borgia, founder and chair of the Pragmatist National Committee. "What's missing isn't another policy list. It's leaders worth trusting, institutions that earn trust back, an informed public, and a politics where disagreement doesn't turn neighbors into enemies. Americans in every corner of the country want that. There was no party organized around it. As of today, there is."

The case for founding the Pragmatists is not a feeling. In September 2025, Gallup found 62 percent of Americans saying a third major party is needed. Forty-five percent of Americans now identify as political independents — a record high. Just 30 percent say the two major parties adequately represent the American people.

The party reads those numbers the way it intends to read every number: as a finding. The finding is that the American majority is politically homeless — not for lack of parties on offer, but for lack of one built from its actual views.

The shorthand will call the Pragmatists a "third party." The label is wrong on the arithmetic — America already has more parties than two, and calling each new one "third" quietly re-crowns the two that hold power. And it is wrong on the geometry: the Pragmatists are not another position on the old left-right line. The party is organized on a different axis altogether — from evidence to outcome — and it rejects the premise that a public question must declare a team before it can be examined.

The Pragmatists are built as a thinking framework, not an ideology. The framework makes three commitments. Start with the people affected, not the loudest interests. Name trade-offs honestly, because every real policy has costs, and pretending otherwise is how public trust dies. And judge every position by outcomes — not by whether it sounds conservative or liberal, but by whether it measurably improves American lives.

Those commitments come with an enforcement mechanism rare in American politics: measurement. Positions the party publishes carry the evidence behind them as they firm up, and every policy it advances is a hypothesis the party has promised to test in public — and to correct in public when it fails.

Even the party's identity declines the old uniform. American politics has worn red and blue for so long that the colors themselves now argue. The Pragmatists are deliberately neither — a shade, not a color, grayscale by design — because what the party offers is not a tribe. It is a way of working.

The party's path is published and dated. Through 2026: build — grow open membership and put the platform through the arguments of a midterm year. In 2027: organize state by state. In 2028: ballot access. From 2029: Pragmatist candidates.

The party publishes that timeline with the same candor it demands of policy. It is not a promise. It is a plan — public, dated, and revised in the open when reality pushes back. That candor is not a hedge. It is the point.

The candor begins with an admission: the Pragmatists do not claim to have all the answers yet. If fixing American politics were easy, one of the many who have tried would have done it by now. It is hard. The commitment is not perfection — it is to get more right than the parties and leaders in power today, and to admit it quickly when the party gets something wrong.

As of this morning, the party's platform, its positions and the evidence behind them, its agenda, and its plan are public at Pragmatists.org — in full, free, for anyone to read, join, or argue with. Membership is free and open to every American.

The founding ask is one sentence long: be counted. The majority those numbers describe becomes real the way anything in a democracy becomes real — by showing up under its own name.

And membership carries an ask that American politics stopped making: stay informed, argue in good faith, and treat Americans you disagree with as fellow citizens, not enemies. A country that intends to govern itself has to be able to talk to itself.

"Two hundred and fifty years in, self-government isn't finished — it's due for maintenance," Borgia said. "That's what a pragmatist believes: not that everything is fine, but that everything can be fixed."