The continuing flight of millions of voters from the Republican and Democratic parties is reshaping the nation’s political landscape in ways no one can control or even predict. It threatens the very basis on which campaigns and elections have been analyzed.

This is a challenge to how America has for generations thought about politics: that it’s a two-party game and people vote for the party they’re loyal to. With growing numbers of independent voters, that’s changing.

As outlined in our recently released book, “The Independent Voter,” my co-authors Jacqueline Salit and Omar Ali and I outline how political scientists and the media have been extremely skeptical and dismissive of independent voters. They often conclude that independents are uninformed, uninvolved “leaners” or “shadow partisans” who are likely voters for Democrats or Republicans but just don’t want to say so out loud.

We believe that conclusion is based on the two-party bias that is baked into the U.S. political system. That bias has misshaped the research and analytical tools used to understand this community of Americans.

Beginning in 1952, when individuals identified themselves to pollsters and researchers as independent voters, they were then asked a follow-up question: Did they prefer one party over the other?

Since most independents indicated a lean toward one of the two major political parties’ candidates, political scientists have labeled them as “leaners,” independents who are likely to vote for one party or another. Political scientists also created a category called the “pure independent,” which was used to describe the fewer than 10% of people who truly refused to say whether they leaned one way or another.

Based on our research, we believe that this conclusion is a fundamental misunderstanding of independent voters and their voting patterns. This misunderstanding has led to mistaken assumptions about this growing population of U.S. citizens who have chosen to distance themselves from the two major parties.

Currently, 42% of Americans identify as independents. This is the highest percentage of independents in more than 75 years of public opinion polling. They rarely numbered more than 20% of voters from 1940 to 1960.

The choice to identify as an independent is a meaningful one, especially so in these politically hyperpolarized times, when many Americans do not feel or no longer feel at home in either party.

This is the reason Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema gave for her December 2022 decision to change her party affiliation from Democrat to independent. Sinema said she believes that “[e]veryday Americans are increasingly left behind by national parties’ rigid partisanship, which has hardened in recent years. Pressures in both parties pull leaders to the edges, allowing the loudest, most extreme voices to determine their respective parties’ priorities.”

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