Independent voters are an overexaggerated myth

America’s largest, fastest-growing political party isn’t led by Joe Biden or Donald Trump. It’s the Independent Party. At least, that was one of the biggest takeaways from a Gallup poll this spring. It found that 49 percent of Americans—roughly the same amount as the number of voters who identify as Democrats and Republicans combined—think of themselves as “independents.” (An identical poll a month later found slightly less eye-catching numbers.) That’s a huge jump from just 20 years ago, when less than a third of respondents identified that way.

But what’s going on behind those numbers? Many in the political press jumped on them as the latest evidence of partisanship’s negative effects. “We spend our days captivated by people with the most power and the biggest mouths,” wrote Axios founder Mike Allen in April. “But it turns out a rising number of Americans want something else—political independence.”

“By far the dominant U.S. party isn’t Democrats or Republicans,” he continued. “It’s: ‘I’ll shop around, thank you.’”

It is true that the rise of independents—and the assumption that a silent majority wants something quite different from what they’re being offered by the two—is beginning to have ripple effects. In December, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced she was leaving the Democratic Party to become an independent, hoping voters in her state would recognize and reward a maverick who was as fed up with politics as they were. (She is currently polling behind both the leading Republican and Democratic challengers for her seat.) And then there is No Labels, the centrist political group recently in the news for its “toxic” work environment and its employment, until March, of disgraced pundit Mark Halperin. That organization, which ostensibly exists to push “bipartisan” policies, has been seeking to get itself on the ballot in more than a dozen states. Its ultimate goal is to push a “unity” ticket featuring one Democrat and one Republican—to woo independent voters who hate both parties, of course.

And then there’s Andrew Yang, the successful businessman who has run two highly unsuccessful campaigns as a Democrat—one for president in 2020, and another for New York City mayor in 2021—and launched the Forward Party, aimed at wooing the nation’s weary voters, last July. “The United States badly needs a new political party—one that reflects the moderate, commonsense majority,” Yang and his backers wrote in a manifesto. The party’s motto—“Not left. Not right. Forward”—envisions an electorate of tens of millions of Americans who are not Democrats or Republicans but are, instead, shopping around.

Except … that really isn’t the case. “The interesting thing about independents is that they do have affiliations to political parties,” said University of Michigan political scientist Yanna Krupnikov—who, with the University of Arizona’s Samara Klar, literally wrote the book on political independents, 2016’s Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction. “They typically have a preference, but it’s potentially different from the deep-seated attachment that a strong partisan might have. But a large portion of them do seem to prefer one party or the other.” Roughly three-quarters of independent voters are known as “leaners”—they typically turn out to vote for one party or the other. Most independents, in other words, aren’t so independent.

Rather, “I think what this reflects is that most Americans have a pretty negative view of the party system in general and of what’s happening in our politics,” Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz told The New Republic. “There’s a reluctance to openly identify oneself as a partisan and to say, come right out and say, ‘I think of myself as a Republican or a Democrat.’”

It’s also possible that some folks just like saying they’re independent, whether they really are or not. “Consider the word itself. ‘Independent’ sounds so empowering, so liberating, so … American,” noted Daniel de Visé in The Hill earlier this year.