Do you want to be an American? I want to hear this is seven out of WLW. This is interesting. A record high forty five percent of adults in America identified as political independence last year, and that number looks like it's going to grow this year in twenty twenty six. But an equal share of adults now consider themselves a twenty seven percent Democrat, twenty seven percent Republican, a forty five percent independent. What the hell does that mean? Actually?
And the independent percentage has increased in the past fifteen years unt around forty percent, but we haven't seen this level like in a long long time. What's driving this whole thing. Joining the show is polster and political advisor. That'd be the legendary Kevin Burton from Crosstown Consulting in northern Kentucky. keV, I doing I'm.
Doing pretty good, Scott, Thank you for that introduction.
Yeah, the legendary in your legendary at this point, this is I mean I look at this and go, okay, forty five percent independent. I consider myself that I tend to lean to the right, but at the same time
more libertarian. I'm kind of an amalgamation of different things, but I vote with my conscience, not because I want to be part of a movement, and I've yet to see a movement that I would be part of, because I think there's a certain amount of corruption and also a glasshouse's nature, and also having to go against some ideals in order to compromise. And maybe I'm a little too stubborn to do that. But it seems like I'm in the majority here at this point. And what does
this mean for the Democrats and Republicans? Of twenty seven percent are Democrats, twenty seven percent of Republicans. They take up all the oxygen in a room.
Yeah, And the reason why independence have grown is because of the primary. So in Kentucky you have a close primary, so only DS can vote for d's, only rs can vote for rs. Eyes can't do anything. In Ohio you can do say, you know, you can do different things.
If you're an eye. You can vote to the Democratic primary, you can vote to the Republican So each state is different, but the primaries always result in the most extremes on both sides, and that's why it's driven more independent because to win a primary, you're usually looking at ten, twelve fifteen percent turnout in off year elections, which frankly, the only people who usually vote on those are people.
Who are really riled up.
So you're going to have the extremes on both sides. So it has pushed more people to the middle. Now, when you do campaigns, though, there's usually about eight to ten percent that are completely non leaning, and those are the core flippers for independence.
How you win elections? Okay, obviously they're important in the election themselves. Some of the old adage about you always campaign to the extremes and you governed from the middle, Well, that that sentiment's been gone for a while now, that's no, that has been true in a while. No o, not at all. I mean, which turns more people in independence. But again, if that's the way the system is designed, it feels like a fruitless effort, is it. Well it is.
And this is where it's kind of ironic that the only time both Democrats and Republicans work together is to squash any third party.
Right. We talked about redistricting in Ohio and Democrats all worked up, Well, what about states or Democrats? Well that's different.
Well, and you know for every California there's an Alabama and vice versa.
So you know.
The bulk of people, and you know you hear this with in your communities.
You know you're at a bar, at.
A church, ninety percent of people just common sense things.
And that's what.
You're seeing with forty five percent of people identifying as independents and the twenty seven percent you know to an R or D, you're really seeing just kind of people where I think are.
Just tired of just being tired of politics. Yeah, yeah, exhausting.
Yeah, can we just get back to being like, hey, I might not agree with you, but it's okay.
Yeah, we want to make politics boring again?
That that should be the next slogan for anyone, right right, Make politics boring?
Yeah, make politics b You don't talk about religion and politics, Well, now we talk about both. And it's exhausting, quite honestly when you start looking at the numbers. Though inside the over forty five almost half the country, for god's sakes, call themselves independence, and let look where we are when it comes to the poop slinging on both sides. Gen z Ors, though in particular, declare their independencity a much higher rate fifty six percent than millennials did when they
were that age of forty seven percent. What does that mean in the long term.
Well, okay, so millennials to gen Z. You also got to remember for millennials, for most of them, they were in college or high school when Obama came in, So like I would take that with a little grain of salt. A lot of gen Zers, you know, they still lean or considered themselves a Democrat when push comes the shelf. So out of the poll they did forty eight percent of them considered themselves a Democrat for considered them Republicans.
And I think it's just simply like you see the Bernie Sanders, the AOC, the Mindannie wing, where frankly they didn't get a fair share from the Democratic Party. And I think that's why more and more people are just saying, you know what, I'm just going to be an independent and on the Republican side, you know, they're that was Trump. I mean, Trump didn't feel like he was getting a fair shaken twenty sixteen, which was a lifetime ago, but you know, he was an outsider running.
Are independence basically socialists and misplaced populars?
Yes, I mean, you know, because like when you're running an election, basically both ours and d's they have these softwares and they're billion dollars softwares and they basically put algorithms and it's way above my pay grade. But there's like one hundred and thirty sub sections and everything, and I'll give you a score. So let's say is zero is a conservative, one hundred is a Democrat. So it will say if I typed in Scott Swan, let's say your score was twenty seven, that would mean that you
have a high probability of voting Republicans. So when you're running these elections, especially with independence, you look at the around ten percent of the independents who really swing the election.
Those are the people who you hear, you.
Know, they voted Trump, Biden, Trump, Obama. And that's and that's where elections are really one. They're one on the margins. And that's the margins, the eight to ten percent non leaning independence.
You've got your twenty seven percent of hardcore conservatives, twenty five percent twenty seven percent hardcore progressives. In order to tiff that that split, you need to draw that ten percent, got it, Yeah.
Because out of out of the other thirty five, basically you can split that seventeen percent both ways and they're going to lean.
To the last of lean to the right.
So it's all about about that ten percent number who really decides federal elections.
Yeah, and I guess that ten percent is on the seesaw going okay, well who do I who? As opposed to who do I really like?
Who?
Who do I who do I hate? Least it's the way we look at that. And I guess that ten percent is that why we will not see or do you think we'll never see another two term present again? For that reason? And I guess, I mean, you can seck you know, Trump's second term technically, but you know Biden was in the middle of that, so we just swung back and forth. Is that why?
I mean? But also I would say both Trump and Biden are kind of outliers. I mean, Biden was going to be eighty three years old and Trump's gonna be, you know, the same, And it was COVID, So I would say, let's see one more president before we make that claim, because both of them are kind of different from the majority. But yeah, it's very very hard if you look at presidential approvals really since the invention of cable news, but really social media, it's almost impossible to
stay above fifty percent approval. So it's going to make it harder and harder to govern, and just harder and harder to block out the noise.
Yeah, okay, gotcha. So Trump's first term, we got the anti trumpers go, hey, we need something. We're tired of this guy. We brought Biden in. Four years later, we got tired of Biden, we brought Trump back. And I'm guessing, you know, with the midterm and then three years from now, are we going to rebel against the Republicans and voted Democrat in.
Well, but that's also the great thing of those countries. There's checks and balances.
Yeah, I mean it is.
You know, you might not like it, but that's that's how we've always been and hopefully that's how we always will be. You know, when one tide gets too strong, the people speak up right and vice versa. So if you ask me today, yes, the midterms would probably look really good for the Democrats as of today, and.
Then we'll see what happened. I mean, again, this has been one year. I can't have three more years, and it just seems like it's getting more and more viral. You know, since we're going at each other even harder, and every day feels like it's a year. As far as news goes, there's definitely been a change the last number of years relative to that. And Trump, of course,
is a whirlwind of activities, always doing something. Certainly every day there's something new, for sure, and either you're excited by that or turned off by it, but everyone definitely has an opinion on it. I look at the general racial breakdowns. Gen Zer fifty six percent identifies independence, Millennials a majority, gen X my generation forty plus percent identifies independence. When you get downe to the baby boomer silent generation,
it's right around thirty three percent. How much does that change? It just seems like the older you get, the more accepting you become of a party. And maybe you know what this whole identity politic thing where people will not question the person they voted for, even if it's a contradiction, they won't point that out. In many ways, that seems to be case you just as the older you get, the more set in the ways you are and you
want to be part of that community. And does that change with future generations where their identity isn't politics.
Well, but you also got to remember, if you're a baby boomer or definitely a silent generation, you really grew up in a whole different world. You didn't have twenty four to seven news for the longest time, the Internet you didn't really have, and definitely non social media. So I think, you know, social media in the twenty four hour news has just changed everything. It's made politics a constant,
you know, I think going forward. I mean, so when you're running an election, generally speaking, I always tell people to kind of block out people sixty and above if they're an independent or a Democrat or a Republican, because their minds are already made up.
If you've voted eight.
Straight elections for one party, it's gonna be really, really hard to try to convince you to switch because you're kind of said in your ways.
Yeah, I mean, you know.
We can't teach an old dog new tricks.
Sorry, old people. Well, you look at brand loyalty, mean you know that that has died, that died some time ago. To with younger generations, you know, used to be like I'm a tied man, I'm a Republican man, I'm a you know, whatever it might be. Younger people don't have those loyalties unless it's sad.
That's about it.
That's true, that's true. Well, you know that's more of a cost issue than anything, because you know, if you decide I'm going Android, your tablet, your laptop, your desktop, your handheld, your mobile, all that stuff is now you got to swap it all up. He's Kevin Burton Polster of Northern Kentucky here, and we're talking about a new study that came out from Gallup. They do this every year. A record high forty five percent of US adults identify
as political independence. In the past year, twenty seven percent each edfin themselves as Democrats or Republicans, and that that middle part, that independent part, becomes critical in elections, He said, about ten percent ten percent will decide the election either way, which is why we go back and forth the days of FDR where we have multiple terms feel like that is it's definitely in the past unless something else changes too.
Taking into account America's party identification of that match out with the twenty seven percent forty seven percent identified as Democrats or said they're a independent, it's forty two percent with the Republicans. That's a three years I think that broke a three years stretch in which Republicans held a an edge and party affiliation. Is that something that also changes or is the Republican party in decline and once the Democrats take power at some point that just swings the other way.
I mean, it's I mean, the Republicans are in charge now, and that's why, you know, I mean, people always it's the backup quarterback syndrome. You know, if things aren't going well, you're always yearning for the backup quarterback. And then once the backup quarterback comes in, you're like, well, there's a reason why I didn't want him in.
The first place.
So, I mean, that's just a give and take of you know, leading. It's so impossible now to actually get above fifty in.
Party registration or approval.
You know, you go back to George W. Bush right after nine to eleven, he had an eighty seven percent approval rating.
That's on the I can't even press about that. Yeah, yeah, and that was probably at the time, and oh my god, you know, because Lincoln had a probably a bad exemplar. Washington, for example, had a ninety nine percent. Yeah, and no, that makes sense too, because as divided as we are, the conservative ideology advantage is shrunk to just seven points. That's the smallest ever. And again I think that's just
in the case what you're talking about here. And I don't know if that I think it could be though, that Trump is redefining what conservative means. I'm not even sure what conservative means anymore. O.
Well, I mean, you know it doesn't mean a small government, no small government because exactly so. But you know, Democrats have really had to come to Jesus meeting kind of this last year. You know, it was a really bad messaging point for you saying, you know, Trump is a threat of democracy when you didn't even have a primary. And I think that's the number one reason why Trump won because as he took away, they're not the number one thing to use against him when you didn't allow an open primary.
Yeah, where does social media go from here? In the Digital Agency mentioned information fragmentation, declining trust, and institutions like journalism did that'll also fuel the independent identification?
Well, I mean that's the I think irony is that as we've gotten more educated, we're actually headed more towards like another dark age. You know. I also do think there's a little bit of kind of a pushback, especially with millennials and gen Z. I don't really see a lot of millennials on Facebook anymore, right, I feel like that time kind of passed for them, you know, in
a lot of ways. I wonder in you know, fifteen twenty years, when we look at the effects of social media, how people looked at the cigarette companies in the nineties or the early two thousand, the effect of gone.
Right, it's just so the the polars and camps even more, you know, it's declining to some degree.
You know.
As an aside here, I have a family members they moved recently and not one of their neighbors, and the first question out their mouse was are you Republican? Because everybody in the streets Republican. And he used to be like, oh, we're Catholic? Are you Catholic? You know where need to go to high school? Things like that, and now it's
it's probably been that way for a while. But I think that's kind of interesting, Like that's that's the whole identity, right is I'm a Republican or I'm I'm a progressive whatever. It might be. More Republicans and progressives here in Cincinnati, but you get the.
Idea well, and you even see that now people will be like, well, I don't want to watch this actor or.
Listen to this thing.
It's like, as long as they're going to commit a crime like r Kelly or P Diddy, like I think, I think you're all right. You can disagree with them, but if they still make good art, like just go with it.
Yeah yeah, Well like back when Senators Carry Right and Teresa Hines Kerry and people were boycotting Heinz ketchup on Mike. Look, yeah, I don't care the politics, but the only ketchup in the world is Heines Ketchup. I'm sorry. There's a lot I would put up before I would boycott Heinz Ketchup. He is a Kevin Burton Polster advisor with Crosstown Consulting in Northern Kentucky. All the best, thanks to the inside,
Appreciate you, Thank you, Scott. Enjoy the warm before the cold hits us again on Wendy but warms go feel good this weekend, Get out and enjoy it. We have lots to do on the Scotts Loan Show. News Happens first though, that's about five minutes from right now, including the forecast and traffic and what you need to know in the world. And then it's Will Gance. So if you're gonna stay in maybe at night, I've got some streaming. I think he's got a movie option for you too
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