OPINION:
There is a peculiar kind of freedom in despising everyone equally. No tribal guilt, no cognitive dissonance — just a clean, bipartisan contempt that doesn’t discriminate by donkey or elephant.
Welcome to the club of America’s “double haters” — the 21% of voters who, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, have decided that both the Democratic and Republican parties are equally contemptible.
That’s up from 13% in the 2022 midterms and from roughly 9% in each of the last two presidential elections, meaning the share of double haters has more than doubled since 2020. The hate is not just alive — it’s thriving, compounding like a bitter money market account.
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Take Troy Evans, a 59-year-old lifelong Republican from the Houston suburbs who sells food for a living and has apparently run out of patience for politicians’ patter. “I want the Republican Party and Democratic Party to wake up and start doing what they say they’re going to do,” he told The Journal. “I haven’t seen it in 40 years.”
Mr. Evans has voted in nearly every major election for four decades, and now he’s sitting 2026 out entirely, disgusted by what he calls the “corporate autocracy of the country.”
And he’s not alone. Kimberly Keener, a 52-year-old bookkeeper in Florida and longtime conservative, is right there with him, marveling at the absurdity of members of Congress “working part time, making $174,000 per year” while everyone else struggles to afford gas. “It’s crazy!” she told The Journal.
Here’s the delicious irony: These double haters are historically the kingmakers. They sided with Democrats in 2018, handing them a House majority, and in 2020, giving Joe Biden the White House. They flipped to Republicans in 2022, giving the GOP control of the House. And they simply hated Kamala Harris more than Donald Trump in 2024.
This year, Democrats are ahead among the “double haters” 55% to 27%, according to The Journal poll — but before Democrats start popping Champagne, consider that about half of either party’s supporters admit their vote is just “probable,” not definite. In other words, double haters are less a loyal customer base and more a group of Yelp reviewers who’ll switch restaurants the second the soup is cold.
It’s not just the cost of living driving this exodus from party loyalty. As Democratic pollster John Anzalone noted, more than three-quarters of adults surveyed in a May poll agreed that “the economic and political systems in this country are stacked against people like me.”
Cook Political Report publisher and editor-in-chief Amy Walter put it more bluntly: “There is a deeper structural anger that is coursing through this body politic, and it isn’t going away after November. These are voters who are upset at the system writ large.”
Meanwhile, over in Montana, a different flavor of disillusionment is producing something almost quaint: an actual independent candidate with an actual shot at winning. Seth Bodnar — Rhodes scholar, Green Beret, university president — is running for the Senate without the comfort of a party machine behind him, and he’s not alone.
The Telegraph reports that independent-aligned groups have identified seven candidates nationwide, backed by millions in outside spending, betting that America’s appetite for party loyalty has finally curdled.
“What people once said was impossible — and that is for an independent to win against Democrats and Republicans — I think is increasingly becoming inevitable,” Mr. Bodnar told The Telegraph, which is either visionary thinking or the kind of thing every underdog candidate says right before losing by 12 points.
Either way, with 45% of voters now identifying as independents — compared with 27% apiece for Republicans and Democrats — he might be onto something.
Even some of the architects of the old political order are jumping ship. Brett Loyd, a former pollster for Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, was reportedly fired a year before the 2020 election for accurately reporting that Mr. Trump was losing in key states.
“We were going on news programs actively lying [about polling],” he told The Telegraph. “I was just so fed up with it that one day I went and gave the actual poll results … and I told my wife, ’I’m done.’”
When your own pollster defects over the dishonesty, that’s not a crack in the foundation — that’s a sinkhole.
So here we are: a country where the most unifying political sentiment is mutual disgust, where lifelong partisans are staying home out of principle and where a Green Beret with a folksy stump speech but no real political party might actually have a path to Washington.
The parties can keep running their attack ads and hoping double haters forget why they’re doubly hating. But as Mr. Evans put it so elegantly after four decades of disappointment, he’s not falling for it again.
And if the polling is any indication, he’s got plenty of company.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com.
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