President Donald Trump won the White House in large part by winning the handful of swing states nationwide, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. And one of the reasons that happened was how independent voters cast their ballots.
Across the country, more independents supported former Vice President Kamala Harris. But, in Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania, they backed President Trump in larger numbers. And, those same independent voters also helped a number of Democratic Senate candidates win their races.
These and other findings come from an analysis by ASU’s Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy. Thom Reilly, co-director of the center, joined The Show to discuss.

Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Good morning, Tom.
THOM REILLY: Mark, thanks for having me.
BRODIE: Thanks for being here. So I want to talk about this notion of splitting first off, because we don't see it a lot with voters who are registered with either the Democratic or Republican parties. How significant was it with independents?
REILLY: It is. You know, based upon the data that we analyzed, the 23,000 exit polls, they had, independents were much more likely to split their ticket than Republicans and Democrats. About 96% of Republicans and Democrats vote straight ticket. Independents, on the other hand, were significantly more likely to split their ticket, particularly in the Senate races.
BRODIE: So what does that tell you about how candidates and campaigns maybe should approach these voters?
REILLY: Yeah, so, you know, one of the reasons for that is it's not a surprise that independents continue to outpace, you know, people who identify as independents outpace the two major parties. The challenge is that their behavior is somewhat hard to predict, and they tend to look at the candidate, the political climate or the events leading up to the election in making their decision. And that again makes this unpredictability is why the campaigns often target this group of voters that are quite elusive, but can defy expectations
BRODIE: Well, and as you and I have talked in the past, an independent isn't necessarily just somebody who's straight in the middle, right? There are independents who are very conservative, independents who are very liberal. So I would imagine that makes it even more challenging for the campaigns to find these voters, but also to figure out how to talk to them.
REILLY: Sure. And you know, if we look at their behavior, it continues to be very unpredictable. You know, if we look just at some of the national voting of independents, you know, they supported Obama by 8 percentage points and flipped and supported …
BRODIE: … in 2008 …
REILLY: … Trump 4 in 2016, and then in 2020 supported Biden by 13% points. In this last election, nationally, they trended towards Harris by 3% points, but that's a 10% swing in four years. So that's a lot of kind of interesting behavior.
And as I said before, is that the data is really showing is that despite a lot of attempts of reaching across the aisle, Republicans vote Republican, Democrats vote Democrat, and they vote straight ticket.
BRODIE: Does that potentially give a state like Arizona, which has a lot of independent voters, maybe more swing, more sway in national elections?
REILLY: It does, and I think that's what we saw in the particularly in the swing states where, you know, we saw particularly in states like Nevada that 14% of the independents, you know, split their vote between the president and the Senate, you know, many partisans are, you know, pretty mystified by this notion that how can somebody you know vote for perhaps a president and then ideologically a different position on a ballot issue or Senate.
And that's what we're seeing, you know, and we're seeing particularly among young people that increasingly identified as independent. They're looking at more pragmatic solutions versus ideological purity, and I think that is what we got to get our heads around, right, is that in the past, particularly in polarized times, we tend to think that people vote straight ticket.
Well, they do if they identify with parties. But this merging group of voters, particularly young people, seem to be kind of cherry picking, right, is that they're looking at a candidate differently at the national level versus the local level. They're looking at issues that they may feel really strong about, but, you know, categorizing that different than perhaps voting for a national or local candidate.
BRODIE: It's interesting though because in some of those cases, I would imagine that voting like that you're voting for two candidates who have diametrically opposed viewpoints. For example, people in Arizona who voted for President Trump who bragged about putting Supreme Court justices on the bench who overturned Roe v. Wade, but then also voting for the abortion initiative, like those are, those are in direct conflict with each other, aren't they?
REILLY: But you know, a lot of them, you know, a lot of these voters or these independent voters too are looking at them a bit differently. They're looking perhaps as I feel very strongly about the economy and I support this candidate because I feel his or her policies have, you know, are stronger on the economy, but I also feel, you know, very important about abortion rights. But you know, I'm not necessarily always linking them together. I'm kind of approaching them on an individual basis. And this is different, and I, and I think, you know, campaigns need to, you know, reevaluate, number one, how they're targeting these individuals, how they're getting information and how they're appealing to them, because they are increasingly defying expectations by voting differently.
BRODIE: Well, so let me ask you about that. How do you expect to see candidates and campaigns talk to this group of voters going forward? I mean, the study also found that the number of independents went from 26% in 2020 to 34% in 2024. That's a pretty big increase. So how do you think campaigns are going to evolve their communication with this group of voters?
REILLY: Well, one is I think that, you know, if we're looking at young people, you know, relying on the political parties as conveyors of information doesn't work because the majority of young people are not party aligned, and they're getting their information from different media sources. So I think, you know, looking at those different type of media sources and appealing, you know, based upon a candidate or an issue very differently, but I think it's also this cognitive, you know, ability to, to reach out to this group of voters to figure out where they stand on certain issues at the time.
You know, there's a lot of talk in this past election perhaps of trying to court voters, Republicans and Democrats, Harris made a lot of effort, particularly in Arizona, with the Mormon vote. She had some high profile endorsements, but at the end of the day, Republicans voted Republicans and Democrats voted Democrats. Perhaps those campaigns may have been better off by targeting independents who don't have this kind of pure allegiance or ideological allegiance to one group or another.