New CNN polling this summer put the number at 47% of Americans who say they don’t consider themselves part of either major party. That’s the highest level of measured partisan independence in more than a decade. Independents also skew younger — 63% of them are under 50 — and they’re more likely to live in cities than Republicans are, though less likely than Democrats.
Read that again. Nearly half the country. Not a fringe. Not a protest vote. A plurality.
I started Urban News Journal on the bet that there’s a real audience of people — politically independent, urban, professional, skeptical of both cable news tribes — who were tired of being told CNN speaks for them or Fox speaks for them when neither actually does. The data caught up to the thesis faster than I expected.
Here’s what nobody in either party’s war room wants to say out loud: the two-party system was built for a country that argued about a narrower set of things. Taxes, foreign policy, abortion, guns — pick your side, pick your team, show up every four years. That system assumes voters are choosing between two coherent worldviews. It does not account for what’s actually happening in living rooms in Milwaukee, in Cleveland, in Charlotte: people who want fiscal discipline and criminal justice reform in the same sentence. People who want strong borders and expanded veterans’ mental health funding in the same platform. People who go to church on Sunday and don’t think that disqualifies them from supporting decriminalization or clean energy.
That voter doesn’t have a party. That voter has been getting a menu with two items on it for thirty years and ordering the one that’s less wrong.
Independent Doesn’t Mean Undecided
The lazy read on rising independent registration is that these are just “moderates” or “swing voters” waiting to be persuaded back into a lane. I’d push back on that. A lot of independents I talk to aren’t undecided — they’re decided on issues and undecided on tribes. They know exactly where they stand on qualified immunity, on school choice, on the VA backlog. What they’ve rejected is the idea that those positions have to bundle into a package deal with everything else a party stands for.
That’s a meaningfully different phenomenon than the “undecided voter” cable news loves to profile in a diner three weeks before an election. It’s a structural rejection of bundling.
And it’s showing up downstream. The Fulcrum recently profiled six U.S. cities where independently elected mayors — people who won outside party structures entirely — are outperforming on infrastructure and public safety metrics compared to their partisan-machine predecessors. That’s not a coincidence. When you’re not spending political capital defending a party brand, you spend it solving the actual problem in front of you.
What This Means If You’re Black, Independent, and Urban
I want to be specific here because generic “independents are rising” coverage tends to flatten a group that isn’t flat. Black independent voters, particularly in cities like Milwaukee, have a different relationship to this realignment than the archetypal suburban swing voter cable news imagines. For a lot of us, independence isn’t disillusionment — it’s inheritance. Many Black voters have spent decades being assumed as a lock for one party while receiving underwhelming returns on that loyalty: underfunded schools, slow-walked infrastructure, criminal justice promises that arrive in speeches and leave in committee.
Calling yourself independent as a Black urban professional isn’t apathy. It’s often the most informed position in the room — you’ve watched both parties take your vote for granted or write you off entirely, and you’ve decided neither posture earns unconditional support.
The Opening Nobody’s Taking
Here’s my actual argument, and it’s a solution, not just a diagnosis: the party or the local coalition that stops treating “independent” as a persuasion target and starts treating it as a governing coalition is going to own the next decade of urban politics. Not by moving to some mushy centrist “both sides have a point” position — independents I know hate that as much as they hate hyper-partisanship. By building actual policy platforms around the issue-by-issue positions independents already hold, instead of asking them to pick a jersey first and get a platform second.
Milwaukee’s next mayoral and county races are a real laboratory for this. Whoever runs a campaign that talks about crime reduction and reentry funding in the same breath, that talks about small business tax relief and expanded mental health access in the same breath, without genuflecting to a party base first — that candidate is running toward where 47% of the country already lives.
Nobody’s built that campaign yet. I’d like to see somebody try.