Forget the economy for the moment. Let's look at independents.

A couple of facts regarding the upcoming election aren’t getting much attention. Yes, these are facts – not perceptions but honest-to-goodness certainty or, if you will, the naked truth. This cogent information revolves around independents, as they are the fulcrum on which the election will pivot. Are they really that important? In a word, yes.

Independents Rising

According to a 2023 Gallup poll, 43% of the American electorate self-identify as independent voters. This number has grown over the years and is now larger than both major political parties: each taps out roughly the same, around 27%. Gallup went a bit further and asked if these independents leaned Democratic or Republican. After tracking this since 1992, the pollster found that, for most of the time, independents leaned blue. However, in 2022, that began to change, and now Gallup gives the Republicans a 45% to 43% edge over the Democrats. But this is a mere blip on the screen compared to another survey.

When digging deeper into the political leanings of the independent voter, a separate study unearthed some relevant information regarding what this part of the electorate believes. A recent article in  Issues & Insights highlighted a survey conducted by Populace, a non-partisan think tank, which homed in on something called the Social Pressure Index (SPI). It was a large study comprising more than 19,000 people, and it asked a lot of questions. But they weren’t the usual polling queries such as “Whom would you vote for?” Instead, “It estimates the gap between Americans’ privately held beliefs and their publicly stated opinions.”

In a nutshell, Populace used a different technique to figure out which way independents leaned. And this is where it gets interesting:

“A majority of Americans (58%) believe most people cannot share their honest opinions about sensitive topics in society today. And they are not wrong: Not only do 61% of Americans admit to self-silencing, private opinion methods reveal that every single demographic group is misrepresenting their true opinions on multiple sensitive issues.”

The results exposed many areas where independents were far more conservative than they were willing to admit. For example, on the topic of “Strong unions are good for the economy,” independents and Republicans were closely aligned. That was also the case in the section that asked if they were “Better off than they were five years ago” and “Student loan bailouts aren’t fair.”

In the area of immigration, independents and Republicans weren’t that far apart on the topic of whether “Illegal immigrants should be deported.” The two camps also converged on the issue of whether “Government has too much control.”

Meanwhile, the growth of American voters’ self-identifying as independent is enormous. When it comes to GenZ, the scales are more tilted, with 61% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 claiming to have no party affiliation. It also provides at least somewhat of an explanation for videos like this one that occurred at the Alabama-Georgia football game, where tens of thousands of college students gave Donald Trump a staggeringly positive reception:

If It Walks Like a Duck …

This extensive survey illustrated that today’s independents blend well with the Republican Party on issues and topics relevant to the election. One takeaway could be that the word “independent,” in many cases, may just be a smokescreen for the shy or silent voter. Considering the current toxic political atmosphere, these people cannot be blamed for wanting to hold their beliefs closely.

However, another takeaway from this research demonstrates that the polls could be very misleading, as they were in 2016. These facts about independents may portend that the presidential race could be won or lost not by a little – but by a lot.