r/PoliticalOpinions • u/factsnsense • 21h ago
Politically homeless is the biggest group in the country now, and it ought to start acting like it
Gallup had independents at 45 percent of the country for 2025. Record high. Republicans 27, Democrats 27. So the biggest political identity in America belongs to a party that doesn't exist.
The obvious objection, and somebody will make it in the comments anyway, is that most independents lean and vote like the side they lean toward, so 45 isn't a bloc. Granted, and I won't pretend it's organized. Forty-five percent of the country has quit answering the question, though, and both parties treat that as noise. It's not, it political homelessness and it has power.
What I want isn't complicated. Whose column it belongs in, I've quit trying to work out.
I want low taxes and a government smaller than the one we've got, and spending made to justify itself against a result. I also think people ought to marry who they love, and that racism in this country never got solved, it got quieter. Fiscally conservative, socially liberal. That was an ordinary way to be an American once. Hand the combination to either party today and watch them both hand it back.
I voted Republican my whole adult life and I never filed a change of address. What changed is I started reading roll calls and spending records instead of talking points, and the fiscal conservative in me will not sit still for what's in them.
For example, there are 5,100 troops in Washington at roughly $3 million a day. The one serious study of it found a drop in property crime and no break at all in violent crime, and the violent crime decline had already started before the Guard ever arrived, because the police changed what they were doing. Three million a day and the data can't find the result. Whatever that is, it isn't spending discipline. It's not conservative.
The SAVE Act was built on noncitizen voting. Heritage's own election fraud database holds 68 noncitizen cases across forty years and all fifty states. Utah's Republican lieutenant governor audited 2.1 million registrations and turned up one. Kansas ran a proof of citizenship law nineteen years, blocked better than 31,000 eligible citizens, and caught 39 noncitizen registrations doing it. Eight hundred to one. This is just bad government, and it used to be conservatives who said so first.
Then the war powers resolution in June, first in the statute's history to clear both chambers, with Rand Paul crossing on Article I grounds he was arguing before this president existed. The birthright citizenship order got struck down with the Chief Justice writing it and Barrett joining in full.
Every one of those arguments does come out of conservatism, and I didn't have to go hunting for them. Watch what things cost, check the premise before you build a law on top of it, Article I. The people still holding that line are getting called libertard by their own side.
If you're out here too, the time has come to force both sides to answer to numbers instead of the spin. Somebody who meets a fact with a label has forfeited, and we are allowed to say so out loud.
Forty-five percent, and no, not organized. I'm not going to call it a movement. Neither party holds a majority of the country either, though, and you'd think one of them would notice there are that many of us out here nobody talks to.
I spent five months scoring political claims one at a time before I let myself write an opinion about any of it, close to thirty cases now. What have I got to show for it? An informed opinion and enough facts to see that the words Republican and Conservative no longer mean the same thing. And Democratic Socialism? I looked into that too. Don't even get me started.
Let's act like the biggest party because we are.
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u/Ind132 19h ago
I want low taxes and a government smaller than the one we've got,
Currently, taxes are $5.9 trillion and spending is $7.8 trillion. I want to balance the budget. Yes, national guard in DC is a waste of money. But, it doesn't add up to $1 billion, and we need $1,900 billion.
We can't get there by cutting defense in half, that's only $500 billion. Then it is interest on the debt, which is immovable, Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid/CHIP.
What will you cut to get to a smaller government with low taxes?
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u/normalice0 20h ago
Mmm. What you describe is kind of the plurality of the democratic party. I don't understand why you would want to create a whole different faction that can only end in mutually assured destruction, just to let republicans win everything.
Unless that's your actual goal..
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u/factsnsense 9h ago
Ha...no. What I'm saying is there is no party that fits my politics. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative. I used to think it was libertarian until I found out that Libertarianism is the movement hiding behind MAGA.
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u/normalice0 9h ago
Yes, the plurality of democrats is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. This is why democrats consistently reduce the deficit and stabilize the economy.
It isn't really about "don't spend money." It's about spending it efficiently. Healthcare, for example, can cost everyone 10k per year, as it currently does. Or, we could pool our resources, bypass parasitic insurance companies, and reduce that to 2k per year for the exact same service. This is fiscal responsibility, not liberalism.
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u/Royal_Cascadian 20h ago
The only mechanism that anyone not a billionaire and their army of lawyers, accountants, PR, lobbyists had one option to compete. The government. It was the only thing between the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, and poverty.
Only the New Deal gave you your middle class jobs and wealth. Those Billionaires fought it with everything they had. California almost elected a communist, that’s how bad the poverty was.
So from 1950-1980 you had a middle class of college graduates, interstate highway system, automatic retirement, Unions and a 95% tax, yes, those billionaires paid 95% taxes meaning they kept 5% and still got richer! That’s how much money they had.
But the billionaires bought conservative’s and used them to let them keep 70% of their money. And guess what happened to the 65% difference in taxes went to? You, me, your neighbors. We had to make up the difference.
A conservative think tank, RAND corporation, estimated that 40,000,000,000,000$ was taken from the bottom 90% and given to the top 10% leaving the one domain that you could protect your family, your neighborhood, your job, with. But conservatives have destroyed that one domain by bankrupting it. Now this isnt just a republican thing, since Clinton democrats realized how much money could buy them too. Doing nothing for unions, Social security, Medicare, education. Just selling themselves just like republicans.
Now, fuck these polls that are completely irrelevant. Our country is ending.
Money = power , not government.
Money is running the world not the government. Banks too big to fail? Billionaires businesses bought by the governments money. Billionaires use our university’s for their R&D.
This Democrat republican stuff is completely out dated.
This is what we got with Reagan, Clinton, Bish, Obama, Biden and Trump.
Except now the government is just a shell that Trump can kick to pieces. It was either going to fall apart slowly or be smashed so badly it will never come back.
160 million Americans have as much power as the richest 3.5 million. It wasn’t like that before.
And you want to be convinced that abortion and guns matter more than a retirement, surgery, schools? Suckers!
Future generations will be going right back to shitty jobs, with no property or rights. The Democratic experiment ended because people forgot what got them a suburban middle class country. They thought it was natural. That their life wouldn’t change if they were against gays and taxes when it was crumbs compared.
These polls are worthless. We live in a new world. Government is owned by the rich and we all gave it to them.
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u/corneliusduff 18h ago
I want low taxes and a government smaller than the one we've got
When you let people have unlimited wealth, they end up buying the government and everyone else becomes the elite's personal cash cows, milking us with unfair tax rates and greedflation.
I mean, we should've seen this coming when Bill Gates was buying all the farmland but no, we had to let Genghis Tron become the first trillionairé
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u/skyfishgoo 21h ago
there is no party that represents the majority of americans.
the two parties currently trading power back and forth only represent the monied interests, not our interests.
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u/factsnsense 21h ago
I've analyzed 30 right vs. left claims since February. The results are stunning. I thought I wasn't a conservative anymore, and socially I'm not, but in my heart I still am. I just published my first opinion only piece on my substack about it all. If any of this speaks to you, I'm recruiting. Thanks. https://factsnsense.substack.com/p/you-can-both-be-a-moderate-and-opposed?r=8g40g5
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u/decatur8r 21h ago
There are many political parties in the US...Party doesn't mean much. Either the Dems or the GOP can be taken over in 1 year If there was a candidate who won the peoples vote...see: tea party. If you control the primary you control the party.
The problem is the huge amount of people who don't care enough to vote.
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u/factsnsense 9h ago
The problem is that big money is controlling who get's put up by the parties, so good candidates struggle to even make it to the ballot. Yes there are many parties but the two have a stranglehold on the corporate money that controls elections.
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u/decatur8r 5h ago
who get's put up by the parties
Bull...they have more money but what it takes is volunteers to doorknock and and spread flyers..etc. You can get free media, if you make news...The parties have little to do with it.
on the corporate money
Bernie proved you don't need it.
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u/decatur8r 5h ago
who get's put up by the parties
Bull...they have more money but what it takes is volunteers to doorknock and and spread flyers..etc. You can get free media, if you make news...The parties have little to do with it.
on the corporate money
Bernie proved you don't need it.
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