The Largest Little Known Scandal in American Politics

With a closing note to my friends in the political press corps.

Sep 13, 2025

Convulsions is a Substack for and about you — witnesses to an age of acrimony. If you like these newsletters, click the orange button and join my mailing list for FREE, and please share on social media.

Paid subscribers get access to my daily pre-dawn “Morning Read-In,” a curation and conversation around the most important stories on politics, culture, communications, and life its own self.

(If you can’t afford a paid subscription and would like one, shoot me an email and I’ll comp you one.)

The single most important and underreported story in 21^st century American politics is the stampede of voters abandoning the two dominant parties — and their systemic exclusion from U.S. elections.

Unite America, a philanthropic venture fund that invests in nonpartisan election reform, calls this “The Primary Problem.” I call it a travesty, the largest little-known scandal in American politics.

Let’s first explore who these voters are; then, how U.S. election laws are rigged to disenfranchise them; and finally, why this epidemic of disenfranchisement receives so little attention.

The duopoly is hemorrhaging voters

Independents are the fast-growing bloc of voters in the United States — tens of millions of people from all walks of life who, despite the two-party lock on American political culture, register or self-identify as a member of neither tribe. While they may cast red or blue ballots on Election Day, they do so not out of loyalty or satisfaction; they vote Democratic or Republican because the system gives them no other choice.

In the runup to the 2024 elections, Gallup data showed a majority of Americans (51%) identified as independent for the first time in its monthly party affiliation index. The chart below takes a longer view and shows the Republican and Democrat parties are hemorrhaging voters — as independents now dominate the electoral population.

When initially asked for their political party identification in 2024, Americans were most likely to identify as independents (43%), with 28% saying they were Democrats and 28% Republicans. That’s a stark change from 1988, when Democrats, Republicans, and independents roughly split the electorate in thirds, according to Gallup.

Pluralities of at least 39% of Americans have identified as political independents each year since 2011, with the latest figure tying the record high, previously registered in 2014 and 2023.

The hottest trend story in the political media today is the voter registration crisis facing Democrats. “Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections, and often by a lot,” the New York Times reported in August.

For as much as that story matters, it ignores a far more important truth: Both parties are in a death spiral of electoral support.

Independent voters outnumber at least one party in nearly two-thirds of the 30 states that register by party. They outnumber both parties in nine of those states. In three states (Alaska, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island), independents make up a majority of the electorate, with Colorado sitting at 49.5% percent and growing.

Those figures come from Unite America, one of my longest-running consulting clients. I’ve known the organization’s executive director, Nick Troiano, since writing about his independent campaign for the House 11 years ago. “If I win,” Nick told me at the time, “it will send a signal to Washington that you better watch out, that there's a huge generation of millennials poised to disrupt politics as usual.”

He lost. Nick learned from that experience just how much the deck is stacked in favor of Democrats and Republicans who write election laws and throw their monopolistic might behind other barriers to candidates who dare to be independent.

Millions of disenfranchised voters

In February 2024, Unite America Institute published an analysis of national election data and determined that over 23.5 million registered independent voters in 22 states are disenfranchised, meaning election laws written by Democratic and Republican lawmakers ban nonpartisan voters from primaries. Another 3.5 million voters registered with minor parties are also barred from primary elections.

That makes a total of 27 million voters blocked from participating in so-called closed primaries, which due to gerrymandering and the polarization of the two major parties are often more consequential than general elections.

Did I say primaries are often more consequential than general elections? Hell yes. The data shows:

91% of U.S. House races next year are already safe for one party and will be decided in the primaries.
Based on previous cycles, Unite America estimates that a mere 7-10% of eligible voters will participate in primaries that elect 91% of House members.
When you factor in ballots cast in the dwindling number of competitive general elections, Unite America estimates that less than 15% of Americans will cast a meaningful vote. In other words, 85% of voters will cast ballots in elections that don’t really matter because the results mostly were determined in closed primaries.
If both parties follow through on their threats to supercharge gerrymandering and make every seat uncompetitive in states they control, more than 95% of races could be decided in next year’s primaries.

This is why Unite America and its partners in reform are pushing for open, all-candidate primaries. “Partisan primaries are not merely one problem among a long list of problems without political system,” Nick wrote in his book, “Primary Solution,” which published in 2024. “They are (pun intended) the Primary Problem in our politics today. Abolishing partisan primaries is therefor the single most important thing we can do to improve representation in our government and hold it accountable to delivering better results.”

What do we know about these excluded independent voters? Unite America Institute data shows:

48% say they do not lean toward one party.
46% have always been registered independents; 26% were previously Democrats, and 27% were previously Republicans.
70% believe both parties are too extreme.
77% consider the fact they are not allowed to vote in partisan primaries to be unfair.
58% say they would be more likely to vote for a party if that party supported allowing them to participate in partisan primaries.

Why isn’t this treated like a scandal?

Imagine if 27 million MAGA voters were denied access to elections that matter. Or if Democratic voters were barred from voting in 90% of races that determined winners. All hell would break lose. The two dominant parties would wrap themselves in the emblems of democracy to ensure their voters aren’t disenfranchised.

As they should.

But when it comes to the plurality of voters who don’t bow to the duopoly, Democratic and Republican leaders rig election laws, corral donors, intimidate competitors, and enlist the media in their conspiracy of disenfranchisement.

Voting rights for me, not thee.

A word for my friends in the political media: Stop!

Stop listening to your Democratic and Republican sources who dismiss or distort the data on independent voters. Stop grabbing at lazy “Ds vs. Rs” narratives and embrace the complexity of the American electorate. Stop ignoring the biggest, most important story in American politics.

There tens of millions of independent voters who don’t connect to a word you’re writing, and 27 million of them are barred from elections that count. Looking for clicks and new audiences? Try them.

Want to cover a great American scandal? Try this one.