Pennsylvania’s Independent Voters Surge, Despite Being Locked Out Of Primaries
- The River 98.9
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
Like many of Pennsylvania’s independent voters, Cumberland County resident Kathryn Malinowski teeters between political parties so she can vote in primaries.
She’s currently a Democrat, but plans to switch her affiliation back to independent after casting her May primary ballot.
“There’s really nothing that fits with me and my viewpoints,” Malinowski, 40, said. “I think both parties are so extreme on either end and … that our current system is broken and used by people who only care about themselves and not the people who elected them.”
Temporarily joining a political party is the only way Malinowski and independent voters can participate in primaries, because Pennsylvania is one of a few states to exclude them from the process of selecting party nominees.
Some voting advocates warn that closed primaries, coupled with America’s dominant two-party system, essentially disenfranchise the fastest-growing group of the commonwealth’s electorate.
The proportion of Pennsylvanians registered as independent or third-party voters has steadily risen from 12% in the 2005 general election to 16% in 2025, according to data from the Department of State.
And the data shows the growth of those voters over the last two decades outpaces both major parties. Registered Democrats dropped to 43% of all Pennsylvania voters last year, after a high of 51% in 2011. Republicans’ gains, on the rise since 2015, brought their share of voters to 41% last year, rectifying a dip in registrations to match their percentage in 2005.
Data acquired from the Pennsylvania Department of State.
“Every time the voter registration numbers come out, there’s a lot of focus on the blue team and the red team,” David Thornburgh, son of former Republican Gov. Dick Thornburgh, told WITF. “But the real story always is the rise of the independents.”
“The change has not been modest,” he noted. “It’s been dramatic, year-to-year.”
For the past six years, Thornburgh has urged state lawmakers to open Pennsylvania’s primaries to independent voters. He was the chief executive at the Philadelphia-based reform group Committee of Seventy, and his group, Ballot PA Action, is leading a grassroots campaign to repeal closed primaries.
Thornburg is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed with the Commonwealth Court that argues the exclusion of unaffiliated voters from the primaries violates the Free and Equal Elections Clause of the state Constitution by weakening the impact of their votes. Justices have not determined whether they’ll hear the case. The plaintiffs did not seek an immediate remedy — only that the justices state Pennsylvania’s closed primaries violate the state Constitution.
Who are these voters?
David Ramsey, 37, is a Dauphin County resident who registered as a Republican when he turned 18 in 2006. By 2015, Ramsey said he realized he didn’t align with either major party.
“I just don’t see the point in joining a party when they’re only concerned with what their politics align with as opposed to getting compromises that can help all of us out,” Ramsey said.
Ramsey said his beliefs lean left, but the “disorganization” of the Democratic Party keeps him from changing his status as an “unaffiliated” voter.
Independent and third-party voters often lean toward one of the two major parties in their voting behavior, according to Stephen Medvic, a political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster. But for whatever reason, he said, these voters have decided not to formally identify with the Republican or Democratic parties.
“There is something in the air that is making a bunch of people say, ‘I don’t want to identify — at least initially — with either party,’ “ Medvic said. “And parties have to take that seriously. They have to ask themselves, ‘Why are we not resonating with a big chunk of the electorate?’ ”
Younger Americans, think millennials and Generation X, are partly to blame for the recent spike in independent voters seen nationally, according to a Gallup poll evaluating interviews from last year. Researchers found more independents lean toward the Democratic Party than toward the GOP, despite the Democrats’ favorability ratings remaining low.