There’s a fresh piece of data out that ought to reframe a conversation sports media has been getting wrong for years, and it lines up with something I’ve believed for a long time about my own readers: most people, athletes included, are not as boxed into a party as the loudest voices on cable news want you to think.
A study from VoteHub, analyzing party registration data across more than 1,500 athletes in the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, and NHL, found that independents make up 41% of pro athletes across those leagues — meaningfully higher than the 27% independent rate in the general population. In the NBA specifically, 45.9% of players are registered independent, edging out the 42.9% registered Democrat and dwarfing the 10% registered Republican. In the NFL, 44% carry no party affiliation at all, with just over 34% Democrat and just over 20% Republican.
Sit with that for a second, because it cuts against the entire framework sports commentary usually runs on. We’ve built a media ecosystem — on both the left and right — that wants athletes, especially Black athletes, to be legible as political symbols. Kneel, and you’re an activist for one camp. Stand for the anthem, and you’re a patriot for the other. Say nothing, and you get accused of cowardice by whichever side wanted to claim you. What this data suggests is that a plurality of these athletes have opted out of that binary altogether, and I don’t think that’s cowardice. I think it’s the same instinct a lot of my readers have: exhaustion with being assigned a political identity you didn’t choose.
Why this tracks with what I hear from Black professionals every week
I built this publication on the premise that there’s a large, underserved audience of politically independent Black and urban professionals who don’t see themselves reflected in either CNN’s framing or Fox’s framing. The assumption baked into a lot of political and sports media is that Black Americans, and by extension Black athletes, function as a monolithic voting bloc that can be spoken for. The data on athletes complicates that same assumption in a public, measurable way. Yes, Black athletes and Black voters both lean Democratic in aggregate — that’s a real and well-documented pattern, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But “lean Democratic in aggregate” and “can be assumed to hold a specific, predictable position on every issue” are two very different claims, and sports commentary in particular tends to collapse that distinction.
There’s also a more cynical read on the independent numbers worth taking seriously: some athletes may be registering independent not out of genuine ideological independence but out of brand management, aware that a public party affiliation invites boycotts, sponsor headaches, or locker room friction. That’s a fair point, and probably true for some share of that 41%. But even if part of the independent number reflects strategic ambiguity rather than pure conviction, that itself tells you something real — it tells you these athletes have calculated that a rigid partisan identity is a liability, not an asset, with the audience they’re trying to reach. That’s the same calculation plenty of thoughtful people make every day.
The trap of “shut up and dribble” cuts both ways
I want to be fair to both sides of this argument because I think both get something right and both overreach. The conservative media critique of athlete activism — that fans tune in for the game, not a lecture, and that athletes leveraging a captive audience to push a specific policy position can feel presumptuous — has a real point buried in it. Nobody signs up for a broadcast expecting a seventh-inning stretch civics lesson, and plenty of working-class fans, Black and white, have said exactly that.
But the flip side of “shut up and dribble” is worse: it’s the demand that athletes, specifically Black athletes whose leagues are built overwhelmingly on Black talent, stay silent about issues that directly affect their own communities while the same commentators have no problem with athletes speaking on charity golf tournaments, military tributes, or breast cancer awareness — political choices in their own right, just ones that don’t make anyone uncomfortable. You can’t credibly demand silence only on the topics that are inconvenient for you.
The honest position, the one I’d actually defend, is that athletes — like anyone else — get to decide for themselves where they land on that spectrum between “these are my convictions and I’ll use my platform” and “I’d rather this platform be about the game.” What a plurality of them are apparently choosing, per this data, is neither pole. They’re choosing independence. That should be respected as a legitimate stance rather than treated as an evasion that needs to be diagnosed.
What this means heading into the next election cycle
Campaigns, and the sports media that covers the intersection of politics and athletics, would be smart to stop treating locker rooms as guaranteed turnout machines for either party. If NBA locker rooms are nearly plurality independent and NFL locker rooms are plurality unaffiliated, then the assumption that a single celebrity endorsement moves a bloc of voters in a predictable direction is weaker than campaign strategists like to believe. It also means the athletes themselves have more room than the current media environment gives them credit for — room to critique a policy without it being read as a full partisan conversion, room to support a specific candidate without that becoming their entire public identity.
For Milwaukee, this lands close to home. The Bucks locker room, like every NBA roster, almost certainly reflects some version of this same independent plurality. The next time a player says something on immigration, policing, or the economy that doesn’t fit neatly into a red or blue box, the right response from fans and media alike isn’t confusion. It’s recognition that the box was too small to begin with.
I didn’t leave the service and build a media company to keep sorting people, athletes included, into two buckets that were never built to hold the actual range of how Americans think. This data is a small, useful reminder that the country — and its locker rooms — are more independent-minded than the loudest voices want you to believe.