In 2004, the percentage of Americans identifying as political independents hit the lowest point since Gallup began regularly tracking party identification in 1988. That year, only 31 percent said they were independent, while Republicans and Democrats were evenly matched among those choosing a party.
That percentage has risen from that record low in 2004 to a record high today — a whopping 45 percent, according to Gallup. It was Republican identification that collapsed first, caused by the souring over the Iraq War and the election of Barack Obama, followed by rising disaffiliation from the Democratic Party a few years later.
Republicans and Democrats are once again at almost even levels, with 27 percent of Americans choosing each one in ways that are increasingly ideologically aligned. The percentage of Republicans who also think of themselves as conservative or very conservative is now at a record high of 77 percent. Democrats have also shifted sharply away from moderation in recent years, with 59 percent now identifying themselves as liberal or very liberal — also a record high. As the parties have moved to the edges, it can feel like a yawning political chasm has been left in their wake.
If so many Americans are independent, and the two parties are increasingly extreme, why hasn’t a third party sprung up? Why aren’t there many independents getting elected?
To understand what record-high independent identification means for our politics, it is important to first remember what the word independent is not. These days, it does not necessarily signify moderation or centrism. Less than half of independents today consider themselves moderate in the Gallup data, with 27 percent identifying as conservative or very conservative and 24 percent identifying as liberal or very liberal.
Plenty of people who are independent declare themselves as such because they find both parties ideologically unsatisfactory, not because they feel they fit somewhere in the middle. The political scientists Lee Drutman, William A. Galston and Tod Lindberg have highlighted in their research that among those who wish there were a third party, there is little consensus around whether that party ought to be truly centrist or whether it ought to outflank the existing parties on the left or right.
This sort of finding dovetails with the long-held political science theory that people who declare themselves independent are often partisans in disguise, with most leaning one way or the other.
In the 2024 election, while the Pew Research Center found self-identified independents broke evenly between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, many of those independents acknowledged they generally leaned more toward one party or another. Of those who said they leaned more toward the G.O.P., 87 percent voted for Mr. Trump, while 91 percent of Democratic-leaning independents voted for Ms. Harris. Each voter may initially tell a pollster like me that they are an independent, but in truth they behave much more like their Republican and Democratic brethren when they get to the ballot box.
In my own surveys, most voters who identify as independents do go on, when pressed, to say they lean more toward one party than the other. Ultimately, I find only that only 9 percent of voters firmly insist they do not pick one side more often than the other. This could prove especially relevant this year as we head into the midterm election cycle, where primaries are the key and are dominated by firm partisans. Persuadable independents are often an afterthought to political campaigns that are more concerned with turning voters in their own base.
Though many independents may vote like fairly loyal partisans, there’s clearly a reason they don’t want to put on the red or blue team jersey. For some, aligning with a party may feel like it is making a statement about who they are, at a time when the parties are far from beloved. In my data, people who identify with one party or another, or who define themselves as conservative or liberal, are more likely to say politics is important to their identity. This is yet another reason independents get less attention in lower-turnout elections, including midterms like the ones coming up this November. I consistently find independents are less likely to say they are motivated or likely to vote.
There are also ways of organizing politically around other labels besides party identification or even conventional ideology. Mr. Trump’s own MAGA movement is a perfect example of this — the substitution of a movement for a party affiliation. In my surveys, when I ask Republicans and Republican-leaning independents if they think of themselves more as supporters of the Republican Party or more as supporters of Donald Trump, I find their answers fairly evenly divided, with the G.O.P.-leaning independents far more likely to think of themselves as MAGA-first. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine a mirror-image on the Democratic side, with disaffected Democratic-leaning Independents rallying around a Zohran Mamdani or an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, defying the label of the Democratic Party while being at little risk of ever actually voting for a Republican.
It’s also true that many Americans identify as independent for reasons having little to do with ideology, a movement or a candidate; they simply may feel disaffected from institutions in general. As the political scientist Dr. Julia Azari told me, her work finds a “strong connection between institutional distrust and negative attitudes about political parties.” In my own data, I find self-identified independents are more likely than either Republicans or Democrats to agree that “most politicians are corrupt or just looking out for their own interests.”
It is precisely this kind of disaffection that may be driving young people away from both parties. Majorities of Generation Z and Millennial respondents identify themselves as independents, in contrast to those of older generations who are more likely to choose one party or the other. In the Gallup data, it is the youngest respondents who are responsible for the rise in independent identification over the decades. Gallup’s Jeffrey M. Jones notes that 56 percent of Gen Z adults identify as independents today. This compares with 47 percent of millennials in 2012 and 40 percent of Gen X adults in 1992. Where people might normally move toward a political party as they age, Millennials have remained persistently independent, and Gen Z is following suit.
Rising political independent identification does not mean our country is moving toward moderation or centrism. For a host of structural reasons, it does not necessarily herald the dawn of a thriving third party. But it does signal that something feels rotten with the way our system currently works, and that voters — especially younger ones — do not want to associate with institutions they feel are not delivering.
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