In many households, politics now shows up less as a team identity and more as a topic to manage carefully something discussed in fragments, avoided in groups, or filtered through personal experience. That shift is visible in new polling that finds more Americans, especially younger adults, declining to call themselves Democrats or Republicans.
A 2025 Gallup analysis found that 45% of U.S. adults identify as independents, a level that stands out against where the country sat two decades ago. Gallup’s yearlong interviewing also places Democrats and Republicans at 27% each. The rise is concentrated among younger generations: majorities of Gen Z adults and millennials identify as independents, compared with about four in 10 Gen X adults and roughly a third or less of older adults.
Even within this growth, “independent” is not a single, stable category. Many people who say they are independent still lean toward one party when asked a follow-up question. Pew Research Center’s benchmark survey work similarly finds that most adults who describe themselves as independent say they lean toward one of the two parties, and that these leaners often resemble partisans in attitudes and behavior. In other words, the label can signal distance from party identity without necessarily signaling distance from party positions.
Gallup’s 2025 trendline also indicates how quickly leanings can move when attachments are weak. In 2025, an average of 47% of U.S. adults identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic, compared with 42% who identified as Republicans or leaned Republican an edge that Gallup attributes less to improving views of Democrats than to a downturn in approval among independents toward President Donald Trump. In a separate Gallup measure from mid-July 2025, Trump’s approval among independents fell to 29%, reflecting a broader pattern in which independents’ views of the party in power become a key driver of short-term alignment.
The longer-run question is what happens when younger cohorts carry independence forward as they age. Gallup notes that millennials and Gen X have continued to identify as independents at relatively high rates over time, suggesting that the current balance is not only a “youth phase.” Pew’s generational-cohort approach points in a similar direction, showing that some cohorts’ partisan balance has shifted meaningfully in recent years, including people born in the 1990s whose earlier Democratic tilt has narrowed.
Ideology adds another layer. Gallup’s data shows independents increasingly describe themselves as “moderate,” with 47% doing so in 2025, while Democrats and Republicans have become less likely to use the moderate label. In practical terms, that creates a tension for both parties: appeals aimed at the growing center-identified independent group can collide with the stronger ideological identities inside each base.
Underlying many of these patterns is a broader confidence problem. Separate national survey tracking has found that only 17% of Americans say they trust the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time,” a historically low measure that has remained depressed for decades. As trust stays low and party identity softens, the electorate looks less anchored more open to short-term shifts, but also more resistant to durable party loyalty.
