Colorado is open to the idea of voting for candidates who don’t have a party, according to a survey released Thursday by the Centrist Project Institute.

The survey indicates 85 percent of Coloradans would consider candidates who don’t belong to a party, and 53 percent don’t like the way Democrats and Republicans are running the state now.

The Centrist Project is trying to recruit independent candidates to run for the statehouse on the notion that three to five independents could deprive either party of an overall majority and force more compromise. Democrats hold a 37-28 majority in the House, and Republican control the Senate by an 18-17 majority.

Colorado has never elected an independent candidate to the legislature. State Rep. Kathleen Curry was elected as a Democrat to represent a handful of high country counties, but she left the party while in office in 2009. She narrowly lost her re-election bid in 2010 to Democrat Roger Wilson, and in 2012, she collected just 13 percent of the vote in the House District 61 race.

Curry is an adviser to the Centrist Project.

The survey and an accompanying paper is available online, but it requires entering an e-mail address for access, and you know what that means.

For the Centrist Project, Triton Polling surveyed 2,026 likely Colorado voters between Aug. 21 and Sept. 10. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 percent.

“It’s not just independent voters who desire independent candidates,” said Nick Troiano, the Colorado-based executive director of the Centrist Project Institute. “Our data shows that independent candidates have a unique opportunity to build a winning electoral coalition of voters across the political spectrum who are tired of politics as usual.”

The survey was done before the Oct. 2-3 special session to fix a mistake in bipartisan bill last year. The session yielded no results, rather than spending about $50,000 to pay legislators to show up.

The Centrist Project noted that unaffiliated voters in Colorado outnumber Republicans or Democrats.

Pollsters said independent voters cited a common reason for their lack of party affiliation:  parties care more about elections than good governance.

“In the past, voters would say they liked the idea of independent candidates but ultimately go back to voting for one party or another,” Troiano stated. “That’s more likely to change in 2018 than ever before, as a substantial base of voters now views both parties as two sides of the same partisan coin. Our research clearly shows an appetite for independent leadership that is not beholden to party bosses or special interests.”