I’ve followed politics my whole life, but I never paid much attention to No Party Preference (NPP) candidates. Why would I? They rarely get a real shot. No big money, no party machinery, no guaranteed seat at the debate table. They exist outside the traditional system and the system tends to act like they don’t exist at all. That changed when I began working on an NPP gubernatorial campaign, for candidate Elaine Culotti. For the first time, I saw how significant the political middle actually is,