Editor's note: This column is part of Changing Minds, a USA TODAY Opinion series. Ahead of the November midterm elections, we talked with people who changed their political beliefs after years of seeing things a certain way. We'll publish their stories over the next few days.

This year's midterm elections narrative casts those contests as a tug-of-war across the political spectrum, pitting enthusiasm-driven Democrats against Republicans eager to retain control of Congress.

But one large and growing block of voters goes overlooked in that telling, probably because they make far less political noise than democratic socialists on the left and President Donald Trump's MAGA base on the right.

Independent voters will decide the midterms. They usually do.

Independents can be challenging to define, as they have never been one homogeneous, like-minded group and come to their place on the voter rolls from different paths. So who are they?

Independent voters are the hardest voting block to understand

Joshua Dyck, a professor of political science at The University of Massachusetts Lowell, told me that independent voters break into two groups when questioned with a seven-point party identification scale, which measures attachment to a political party.

Two-thirds of independent voters actually lean toward the Democratic Party or the Republican Party as reliable partisan voters 80-85% of the time, Dyck said.

The rest – the professor called them "pure independents" – dislike politics and don't engage with the process. They cast their ballots based on "lived experience" in their personal lives, not partisan rhetoric. And he said pure independents can be three times more likely to not vote in elections.

The American National Elections Studies, a collaboration of four universities and funded by the National Science Foundation, set the number of "pure independents" or "independent independents" at just 6.7% of the electorate during the 2024 presidential........

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