Elizabeth Harmer was born and raised in Utah, and when she registered to vote at age 18, she declared herself a Republican. At the time, voters could punch out their ballots and vote along a party line.

“That just really discouraged me,” Harmer said. “Like without seeing the candidate, knowing who the candidate was, even reading their name, you just vote straight party.”

It wasn’t how she wanted to vote, and it inspired her to change her party registration. Today, Harmer is 53, living in Utah County and working in healthcare, and she’s been an unaffiliated voter for decades.

[Read more: Check out The Tribune’s 2026 voter guide.]

In recent years, she said, she’s felt better and better about that decision, as she strongly dislikes President Donald Trump but doesn’t identify as a Democrat, either.

“I feel like neither party represents me,” she said.

When it comes time to vote, she added, she works to learn about everyone on the ballot and decide on principle. “I’ve always voted both ways,” she said. “I’m voting for a candidate, not for a party.”

Though Harmer said she has sometimes felt isolated in her decision to eschew party politics, new data shows that thousands of Utah voters are doing the same.

Unaffiliated voters have seen the largest gains in the state this year, surging with more than 29,000 new registrants. Democrats have seen more moderate increases, with over 13,000 new active voters gained. Republicans, meanwhile, have lost about 7,000. (Active voters, by the way, are defined as those who have taken part in either of the past two general elections, in 2022 and 2024.)

The trend was recently noted by unaffiliated U.S. Congressional District 4 candidate Steven Burt, who cheered on the rise in voters skipping the two-party duopoly. Burt is seeking to represent an area that covers parts of Salt Lake and Utah counties, along with the entirety of Juab, Millard, Sanpete, Sevier and Tooele counties. U.S. Rep. Mike Kennedy, a Republican, is running for reelection in the district.

“It shows that voters in Utah, like others across the nation, are tired of our broken political system, and are looking for alternatives,” Burt told The Salt Lake Tribune.

A shift in voting habits?

Some of the increase in unaffiliated voters came in February, when the former “No Labels” party dissolved, returning its roughly 10,000 voters to unaffiliated status. But even removing that from the data, unaffiliated voters have seen larger gains than any political party in 2026, according to numbers from the Utah Lieutenant Governor’s Office, which oversees the state’s elections.

Burt said he finds the data he highlighted “compelling because it has to do with formal affiliation among active voters. I believe this year that trend will start to manifest itself in a startling way in voting patterns.”

U.S. Rep. Blake Moore, a Republican and Utah’s only member of congressional leadership, said he has noticed the trend, too, as a number of third-party and independent candidates are on the ballot in his and other races this November.

“Based off the last several years of general elections, you’re definitely seeing an increase in third-party candidates obtaining more of that vote,” Moore said in an interview. “Not to the point where they would emerge as a winner, but they’re definitely taking a portion of that vote.”

And it’s undeniable that a swath of Utah Republicans are upset with President Donald Trump, Moore said. That, he said, is driving a rise in unaffiliated voters.

“There is a frustration with the administration on things like Iran and gas prices,” Moore said. “They may not necessarily think that [they want] Democrats in control, but a frustration vote would go towards a third party.”

Recent years have demonstrated as much: Moore pointed to Evan McMullin’s independent presidential run in 2016 and U.S. Senate run in 2022, where he received 21.3% and 42.7% of the vote in Utah, respectively. (McMullin also received the endorsement of the state Democratic Party in 2022, and no Democratic Senate candidate appeared on the ballot that year.)

But McMullin was something of an aberration. Most other unaffiliated candidates have struggled to make significant inroads in recent years, usually earning only a fraction of the vote.

A Trump effect?

Matthew Burbank, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Utah, also suspects the rise in unaffiliated voters is largely a reaction to Trump.

What’s unclear, however, is whether this trend will continue into the future.

Burbank thinks some Republican defectors are voting with Democrats but don’t want to take on the party label. They can find cover, he said, with an unaffiliated registration.

Utah’s primary system, he added, may also impact voters’ decisions about registering unaffiliated: States with closed primaries (that is, primary contests where you must be registered with the party to participate) usually see more party affiliation. But in Utah, only Republicans have closed primaries.

This means that voters who chose to register as unaffiliated cannot weigh in on Republican primaries, but can still vote in Democratic primaries without registering with the party.

“You just tend to see weaker numbers for Democrats here in part because unaffiliated voters can vote with Democrats really easily if they want to, and if they don’t want to, they don’t have to,” Burbank said.

Republicans still lead — by a lot

When you look at the past decade, Republicans have dominated the voter registration battle in Utah, with Democrats coming in second and a relatively small number of voters choosing any other party or remaining unaffiliated.

The largest spikes came in the early months of 2020, when many voters registered Republican to, in part, have a say in the contentious gubernatorial primary between Spencer Cox, Jon Huntsman Jr., Greg Hughes and Thomas Wright.

So is the popularity of the unaffiliateds a relative blip or the start of a new trend? Time will have to tell. But Burt, for one, is optimistic about their fate in Utah and nationwide.

“I believe that by 2036 we will have two to three elected independents in the U.S. Senate, and eight to 12 in the U.S. House,” Burt said.