Russell Dutton
Ask ten Americans which party they belong to. Almost half will tell you neither. Forty-five percent of U.S. adults now identify as independents — a record high, and more than either Democrats or Republicans, each at 27%.
The more damning fact is that new voters are overwhelmingly rejecting both parties. In Pennsylvania, nearly 70% of new voters have registered as independents since last September. In North Carolina, that number is over 90%.
This hasn't happened overnight. Over the last two decades, party dysfunction and a litany of government failures — shutdowns measured in weeks, a ballooning national debt, rising health care costs, crumbling infrastructure — have driven congressional approval down and independent registration up.
Today approval sits at 10%.
The results are hard to miss. In the 31 states that record party affiliation, roughly 34 million voters — nearly 30% of the electorate — are now independents. That makes them the largest voting bloc in nine, and in three, an outright majority.
In more than half of those states, independents are locked out of at least one party's primary — and in eight, including Pennsylvania, out of both.
In these states, registering independent means forfeiting your vote in the election that decides most congressional races. Nearly 1.2 million Pennsylvanians have decided to pay that price, including the 70% of new voters since last September.
Before 2016, Colorado's primaries were closed to independent voters. At that time, they made up just over a third of the electorate. Today they are over 50% — a majority of the entire state. Given a real choice, they chose none of the above.
Some argue the independent voter is a myth — that most of these people lean one way or the other and vote accordingly. Even a Newsweek analysis published last month acknowledges that the independent label represents no unified ideology.
That may be true. It's also beside the point.
Voters are not rejecting the principles each party claims to stand for. They are rejecting the one ideology that unites the parties, and that both practice: party first.
But almost 95% of congressional ballots give voters only two choices, and in some, just one. A ballot with two options tells you nothing about whether a voter wanted either one. A ballot with one tells you even less.
Every year, millions of voters are deciding the system doesn't work. They just haven't had any real options.
That is beginning to change. The same Newsweek analysis found that 217 independents are running for Congress this cycle — 170 for the House, 47 for the Senate — across 153 separate races, the highest since 2000.
Dan Osborn is one of them. In 2024, as a first-time candidate with no party behind him — no fundraising arm, no vendor list, no staff who'd done this before — he lost a Senate race to an incumbent by less than seven points in a state Trump carried by more than twenty.
This time, against a new opponent, he's tied in every major poll. In Montana, a recent GQR poll shows independent Seth Bodnar beating Republican Kurt Alme in a two-way race — while the Democrat on the ballot loses to Alme by eight.
Most of these campaigns will lose. But it only takes one win for voters to see they have somewhere else to go.
Russell Dutton is the founder of AIM (Alliance for an Independent Majority). He writes on political independence, electoral reform, and the failures of the two-party system. His work has previously appeared on AL.com.