Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, discusses House Ratings for 2024, why control of the House of the House Representatives begins as a Toss-up, the most competitive seats and the role that redistricting and gerrymandering will play in determining outcomes.
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The Tue., Nov. 3 midterm election is about six weeks away. According to recent research, 27% of U.S. adults identify as Democrats, 27% as Republicans, and 1% as members of a third party. This leaves a massive 45% of Americans who identify as political independents.
An analysis of self-identified independents, whether conducted by Gallup or the Pew Research Center, finds that about 47% lean toward the Democratic platform, 42% favor GOP policies, and 10% are “truly” independent.
Here is another important data point: Pew Research notes that roughly 96% of registered Democrats vote straight-ticket and 94% of registered Republicans vote for GOP candidates. Hence, the 10% of truly independent voters, who don’t lean left or right, may well determine congressional and statewide political outcomes on Nov. 3.
Both Gallup and CNN report that the number of registered independents recently hit their highest level in a decade. Why? Polling data indicate this is because truly independent voters weigh real-world economic and foreign policy outcomes rather than strict party positions. As Democrats and Republicans push contrasting visions, it is quite possible independent voters will swing the Nov. 3 election outcomes due to several crucial dimensions:
Foreign conflict and military engagement
Trump’s Iran War, now into its 7th month of fighting, placed foreign intervention front and center. Independent voters typically exhibit strong non-interventionist tendencies. Their Nov. 3 vote may hinge on whether they view Mr. Trump and Pete Hegseth’s war – not authorized by Congress -- as necessary national security or as an overextension of military force.
Energy, gasoline and diesel price impacts
Turmoil in the Strait of Hormuz, whereby Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth were warned about Iran’s potential control of the waterway, has directly pushed up global energy costs.
According to a Moody’s analysis, the average U.S. household has paid nearly $450 more on gas and energy since Trump’s Iran War started (CNBC). Independent voters react strongly to daily cost fluctuations, making grocery, household goods, energy, gasoline, and diesel prices a major barometer for their trust (or lack thereof) in foreign policy execution.
Tariff burden on consumers
Mr. Trump’s tariff policies, intended to encourage domestic rejuvenation, have drawn skepticism regarding their impact on consumer prices. In general, 59-68% of Republicans favor the tariff policy, 89-93% of Democrats oppose it, and 78% of independents feel tariffs have a negative economic impact because they are a hidden tax on everyday household goods (Pew Research Center). The non-partisan Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s tariffs added about $1,000 to the average American household’s expenses in 2025 and will cost around $600 in 2026.
Immigration and border Enforcement
Independent voters support secure borders but prefer measured and orderly immigration solutions. How independent voters perceive Mr. Trump and Stephen Miller’s aggressive immigration enforcement, masked and unidentified ICE agents conducting raids without court orders, and 57 people having died in ICE or Border Patrol custody since March 2025 may shape their voting decision.
National debt and fiscal responsibility
Fiscally conservative independents are increasingly uneasy with rising defense spending and mounting national debt. Fact-seeking independents know the USA’s national debt exceeds $40 trillion, know we pay $3 billion per day in the cost of Trump’s Iran War, and that the cost to each American household will be in the $1,000-$1,200 range (Peter G. Patterson Progress).
Public trust and democratic integrity
Recent survey trends show that independent voters prioritize political integrity, transparent governance, non-partisan gerrymandering reform, evidence-based policy, executive actions, and protecting state voting authority from federal or postal interference. By rejecting institutional and executive-branch overreach, independent voters use their votes as a stabilizing check on government power.
Trump’s approval rating
It may come as no surprise that independents are not particularly fond of Mr. Trump’s job performance. Trump’s approval rating hasn’t been above 30% with independents since early March (FiftyPlusOne).
The power of independent voters
Academic and empirical evidence highlights why the core 10% of independents who are “truly” self-reliant voters may serve as a critical tipping point for Nov. 3’s congressional and statewide seats. First, midterm elections often trigger a “thermostatic which unaligned voters shift against the ruling party to balance. Scientists note that when 94-96% of voters support candidates in the two major political parties, the 10% of unaligned and truly independent voters hold 100% of the deciding leverage.
We the People
Because the truly independent voters are deeply dissatisfied with the country’s direction, this crucial voting bloc is poised to decide the election on Nov. 3. Remember, "Bad politicians are elected by citizens who do not vote.” So, regardless of your political persuasion, on or before Tue., Nov. 3, vote!
Steve Corbin is a Professor Emeritus of Marketing, University of Northern Iowa, and a non-paid freelance guest columnist contributor to 158 newspapers and 47 social media platforms in 44 states.
Americans have rarely trusted their institutions less. In June, Gallup found average confidence in the 14 institutions it tracks was near a record low. Some 9% of the public trusted Congress, 27% trusted the Supreme Court, and 45% trusted the police. The criminal justice system, as a whole, ranked near the bottom.
Below those totals, however, lies a more telling story of divergence. Trust increasingly depends not on how an institution behaves, but on whether your side happens to run it. Republicans and Democrats each only have even a modest degree of confidence in Congress when their party is in control.
Some of that swing is inevitable in an elected body that translates political majorities into policy. But a floor exists beneath which partisan-contingent trust curdles into something more dangerous. And no institution is closer to that floor than the criminal justice system, which determines when a person loses their liberty and, in some cases, their life.
A voter whose candidate loses at the polls can gear up for a better result in the next election. But a defendant gets no do-over on an arrest, a bail hearing, or a sentencing. And a crime victim whose case is ignored or botched never gets justice. What the criminal justice system is supposed to answer, case by case, is a simple question: Will the same rules apply to me, no matter who is in power?
Increasingly, Americans are answering that question by team. In 2013, the year before an officer’s fatal shooting of a young Black man caused an uprising in Ferguson, MO, Republicans and Democrats were separated by just 9 points in their confidence in the police. That means Republicans were more likely to trust police, but not by a large margin. This year, however, Gallup put the gap at 45 percentage points, the widest ever recorded for a non-elected institution, and larger than the partisan gaps on the Supreme Court, big business, or the church.
The same lens now warps how Americans assess crime itself. Ninety percent of Republicans said crime had risen the year before Donald Trump returned to office even though it had declined; roughly half said the same the year after. Democrats moved in the opposite direction over the same 12 months, even as crime continued to fall.
Once justice starts to look like a team sport, the country loses something it will not easily rebuild: the shared conviction that the process is fair even when your side does not like the outcome. Two bulwarks undergird the system: the formal rules are largely fixed, and the informal rules are the fulcrum. Due process, the formal constitutional promise that the same procedures apply in every American courtroom regardless of who is in charge, is reasonably robust on paper. What varies far more, and what shapes whether the guarantee feels real, is procedural justice: how a person is actually treated by the officer who stops them, the deputy who books them, the parole officer who supervises their release. When the daily practice matches the paper guarantee, legitimacy holds. When it does not, even the strongest formal protections begin to look like scenery.
Decades of research on procedural justice converge on a core finding: How a case is handled matters to public confidence about as much as how it turns out. Americans who perceive the police and courts as fair are more likely to obey the law without the threat of force, report crimes, and cooperate as witnesses — the last of which is among the strongest predictors of whether a crime will ever be solved. One evaluation of a procedural justice training program at the Chicago Police Department found that it reduced both complaints against officers and use-of-force incidents.
Fair process depends on playing by the rules even when it costs you. Consider the exclusionary rule. Evidence obtained in violation of the Constitution may be relevant to a case, even damning, but the courts will — and should — throw it out anyway. The reason goes well beyond any particular case: The credibility of every future stop, arrest, and prosecution depends on the public believing the same process is used for every individual, regardless of the circumstances. When an officer explains why a person is being detained, follows the rules through a tense encounter, and treats that person with dignity, the person is more likely to see the outcome as legitimate, even if he or she disputes it.
Recent history in policing shows both the fragility and the promise of building that kind of trust. After George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, confidence in the police dropped to a record low of 43% in 2023 before rebounding to 51% in 2024 — the largest one-year jump Gallup has measured. Although causality is difficult to establish, over those years states passed hundreds of policing laws, and many departments banned chokeholds, required officers to step in when colleagues use excessive force, and joined shared online registries that flag officers who have lost their credentials for misconduct. Many of those policies were endorsed by the Council on Criminal Justice Task Force on Policing, which called for a national database of decertified officers, increased oversight, and formal training of officers in the principles of procedural justice that studies say can build public trust.
Research in jails and prisons documents a similar pattern. Facilities become safer, and rule-breaking decreases, when people behind bars perceive that grievances are addressed through clear, consistent procedures and when decisions are explained rather than just announced. Procedural justice inside those walls protects the people held there. It also protects everyone outside the prison gate by maintaining the system's credibility for anyone who might one day end up on the wrong side of a case.
The argument for reinforcing due process through procedural justice is never stronger than when confidence in the system largely depends on whether one’s own team is in power. A democracy can live with a Congress that many see as tribal; after all, voters get to hire and fire that group every two years. It has much less room to spare when Americans come to believe that whether they get equal treatment from a police officer, a prosecutor, or a judge depends on which side is holding the gavel.
Politics may continue to be about red and blue teams, but all Americans win when the justice system is a neutral zone where fairness prevails.
Marc Levin is Chief Policy Counsel for the Council on Criminal Justice. He previously developed the concept for the Right on Crime initiative at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Khalil Cumberbatch is Director of Engagement and Partnerships at the Council on Criminal Justice and a formerly incarcerated advocate who, as Associate V.P. of The Fortune Society in New York City, spearheaded efforts to help other former prisoners rebuild their lives.
Cardboard ballot box with a voter slip being placed into it by a hand, with a blue and red coloured background.
I made the immodest proposal in my edited interdisciplinary volume Leveraging: A Political, Economic, and Societal Framework that the contemporary analogue to what Max Weber called the "Protestant Work Ethic" in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was what I called "the Leverage Ethic."
Moreover, I suggested that the Leverage Ethic has more or less replaced what the late Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell called the "Consumer Ethic" in his classic book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, which he argued more or less replaced the Protestant Work Ethic.
Weber argued that one of the chief causes of the rise of industrial capitalism was the belief system associated with the Protestant Reformation. Hard work, asceticism, self-reliance, and a penchant for saving rather than spending -- these qualities were central to the growth of industrial capitalism in England, Western Europe and the United States.
Bell explained that the Protestant Work Ethic was anchored in the foundation of American capitalism from the 1920s to the late 20th century even though it was essentially overtaken by the Consumer Ethic. This new model of work and success was based on the acquisition of consumer goods, especially via credit cards -- washing machines, refrigerators, televisions, cars, and more.
One of the chief contradictions of capitalism, on Bell's view, was indeed the tension between the saving and investment mentality of the Protestant Work Ethic and the spending and hedonistic mentality of the Consumer Ethic. The foundation of industrial capitalism was radically at odds with the fast-moving animating force of the American economy.
Today, we live in the Age of Leverage --bargaining leverage, resource leverage, and financial leverage. Our age is animated by targeted efforts to get the most from the least via conceptual rather than manual tools, whether it concerns information technology, political negotiations, or financial investment strategies.
Success is not judged by whether you can save money or buy or produce products and services; instead, success is judged by whether you can use creative leveraging strategies to advance all aspects of personal life, the business world and political affairs.
Get a million customers from a set of emails and tweets. Get three million votes from a YouTube video. Get five million dollars from a modest investment. Use AI, which is leverage on steroids, to solve organizational problems in one one hundredth the time.
The Protestant Work Ethic and the Consumer Ethic have not completely disappeared, but our society is characterized more by the Leverage Ethic than either of these two ethics. These Ethics, moreover, are less about an ethical philosophy of living than a set of strategies to get things done and be successful.
Leverage is used every day in the White House and on Capitol Hill. But there is an emerging structural change in our politics that will be powered by leveraging at a new level. Or at least it can be if we harness the forces before us.
This emerging structural change concerns the process of solving the problem experienced by over 60 million American voters who identify as independents rather than Democrats or Republicans. Gallup reports that 45% of American voters identified as independents in 2025.
The problem is that the independents, like the colonists in the 18th century, lack representation. There are three independents in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House. If there were six independents from diverse perspectives in the U.S. Senate, they would constitute an Independent Caucus which would possess enormous leverage.
Neither party can get 60 votes in the Senate today except for rare occasions. If there was an Independent Caucus with six senators, neither party could get 60 votes on major policy bills outside of the budget process (where "reconciliation" can be used requiring only 51 votes) without all or most members of the Independent Caucus.
Together, the Democrats, Republicans and independents could reach tripartisan agreements on major bills concerning energy, immigration, entitlement reform, and childcare and parental leave. Indeed, together they would seek to achieve not bipartisanship but tripartisanship. Tripartisanship is the political manifestation of the Leverage Ethic.
We must give representation to independents, which will help to overcome the hostility, polarization, and dysfunction of our politics today. Consciousness must be raised about the Leverage Ethic itself to mobilize the forces needed to reach the tripartisan ideal. If we take the Tripartisan Turn, then American society will in time be animated by the Leverage Ethic and the Spirit of Tripartisanship.
Dave Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework," has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
President Donald Trump holds an image showing the size of Meta’s new data center during a cabinet meeting on Aug. 26, 2025.
I’ve covered a lot of elections — and most times, the issues that are going to really matter to voters aren’t brand new or sprung on them with just two months to go, arriving out of nowhere. They’re predictable — the economy, a war, a long-contentious policy fight.
This year is different. While most voters tell us their biggest concern is affordability, a new issue has entered the chat, taking up an outsized amount of space on the campaign trail, on the airwaves, and in party war rooms.
AI.
The advent of giant data centers, along with new fears about artificial intelligence and the companies overseeing the technology, as well as the growing issue of privacy and Flock cameras are all presenting a brand-new mine field for politicians and party leaders, and they are scrambling to adapt.
The issues are so new to voters, in fact, that neither Democrats nor Republicans seem to have a good handle on what their positions are.
In Pennsylvania, an important swing state with a number of key House races in play, Gov. Josh Shapiro did an about-face last month, seemingly acknowledging the growing opposition.
Just this past February, the Democratic potential presidential contender touted new data centers, promising it would help mitigate the risk that China would outpace us on AI.
But just a few months later, Shapiro signed an executive order dramatically reining in the tech, and calling out “predatory” developers.
Over on the right, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott performed the same jiujitsu, at first welcoming a $40 billion investment from Google last year, and then pausing approvals for about 1,800 data center projects this month.
Democrats seem to be settling into arguments over environmental and quality of life concerns, where Republicans are increasingly embracing arguments for more local control.
It’s undoubtedly a hasty response to a dramatic shift in public opinion this year, perhaps thanks to a high-profile case in Utah involving Kevin O’Leary from “Shark Tank,” in which public backlash forced him to drastically scale back his development plans from 40,000 acres down to roughly 20,000.
A new UMass Amherst poll shows 65% of Americans do not want data centers in their communities, and it’s the rare issue that crosses party lines.
Compounding fears was a terrifying warning from a former AI executive last week that AI could end civilization within a decade and the tech companies aren’t doing enough about it.
Rounding off the trifecta of worrisome tech issues are Flock cameras, automated license plate readers installed everywhere that capture vehicle and driver data.
None of this is popular with voters. But while both parties and candidates all over the country seem keenly aware of this fact, one political figure does not: Donald Trump.
In the past week, Trump has weighed into the controversies with what seems like reckless abandon in an election year.
He’s come out in favor of data centers, telling voters that otherwise they’ll be “backwards and poor.”
He’s called fears over AI “a hoax,” likening them to fears over climate change (also a hoax, to him), and rejected calls for more regulation.
And this week, he said he liked Flock cameras, despite jam-packed town halls full of angry citizens protesting the invasive technology.
Trump’s been unmoved by public opinion on other issues, of course, including the war in Iran, tariffs, abortion, and the Epstein files. And that may just see Republicans lose their majority this November. It’s never a good idea to tell voters they’re wrong about how they feel.
It’s also not often a brand-new issue threatens to upend an election cycle, and the president is telling worried voters it doesn’t matter.
Whether he cares or not, the people disagree.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
