If you’ve ever been in a conversation about politics, you’ve probably heard someone say, “I don’t like either party” or “Politics is just so ugly these days.” That person also may have claimed not to identify as a Democrat or a Republican but as an independent instead.
Today, that person is pretty representative of how Americans identify politically. The share of Americans who say they’re independent has climbed considerably, according to
Gallup’s quarterly party affiliation data. In the late 1980s, roughly one-third of Americans identified as Democratic, Republican or independent. Now, 40 percent or more identify as independent, while the share who identify as Democrats or Republicans has fallen to around 30 percent or lower, as the chart below shows.
On the one hand, more Americans identifying as independent probably doesn’t seem like a bad thing. Independents are
often portrayed as
more open-minded and
less dogmatic in their political views. And in a nation whose
founders feared factional politics, the value of political independence is also an attractive one to many Americans.
The problem is that few independents are
actually independent. Roughly 3 in 4 independents still lean toward one of the two major political parties, and
studies show that these voters aren’t all that different from the
voters in the party they lean toward. Independents who lean toward a party also
tend to back that party at almost the same rate as openly partisan voters.
“Independents tend not to look all that different from partisans,” said
Samara Klar, a political scientist at the University of Arizona and
co-author of the book “Independent Politics.” “But they do tend to be more averse to identifying themselves as a partisan when there is a negative stigma associated with partisanship. So, it’s really the arguments, the hostility, the negativity that seems to be driving this behavior.”
