An election worker places a sign outside a polling station in Burnsville, North Carolina, before polls open on November 5, 2024. Allison Joyce/AFP/Getty Images

There are three broad groups of voters you’re likely to read about in American elections: Democrats, Republicans and independents.

More and more voters have identified as independents in recent years, and when independents break one way or the other, they invariably decide who wins.

But independent voters are far from a united group, as CNN’s polling unit shows with a new project that identifies at least five distinct types of independents.

Many independents, it turns out, aren’t really that independent at all. They’re either “Democratic lookalikes” or “Republican lookalikes,” generally supporting one party’s candidates withou

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