Keep Factually independent
Whether you agree or disagree with our analysis, these conversations matter for democracy. We don't take money from political groups - even a $5 donation helps us keep it that way.
Fact check: Which California counties have the highest percentage of independent voters?
Executive Summary
California’s statewide registration snapshots in 2025 show No Party Preference (NPP) voters made up about 22.3% of registered voters, but the provided materials do not identify a ranked list of counties with the highest share of independents; answering “which counties have the highest percentage” therefore requires county-level tabulation from the Secretary of State data rather than relying on the summaries alone [1] [2]. The available documents and notes point to the presence of county-by-county breakdowns in official reports, but the secondary summaries supplied here are either high-level or outdated and do not by themselves resolve the county ranking question [1] [3].
1. Why the claim “which counties have the most independents” can’t be answered directly from these summaries
The extracts explicitly state that the February 2025 Report of Registration shows 5,116,983 No Party Preference voters (22.3% statewide) but also note the report doesn’t directly list the counties with the highest NPP percentages; instead, the report provides raw county registration tables that must be calculated to produce a ranked list [1] [2]. The secondary sources included in the analysis bundle either focus on other states, offer demographic commentary, or present an outdated county report (Siskiyou, 2021), so they cannot substitute for a fresh county-by-county computation based on the 2025 tables [4] [5] [3].
2. What the Secretary of State data does establish and why it matters
The official registration snapshots supplied in the materials confirm a significant and growing bloc of NPP voters statewide by early 2025, making them politically consequential; the presence of county-level registers in the same report means the question is answerable but requires extracting and computing shares for each county from those tables [1] [2]. This matters because statewide percentages mask variation: coastal suburban counties, rural interior counties, and traditionally partisan strongholds can have very different NPP concentrations, so policy and campaign strategies depend on county-level percentages rather than the statewide 22.3% headline [1] [5].
3. Differences and gaps among the supplied sources that affect any county ranking
The supplied items show three key gaps: summaries that cite statewide NPP totals without county rankings, an out-of-date county report (Siskiyou, 2021) that can mislead if used as current evidence, and contextual pieces about independent voter demographics that are national or age-focused rather than county-specific [1] [3] [5]. Because each source is partial and oriented differently—administrative snapshot, local county page, and demographic commentary—any authoritative county ranking requires synthesizing the Secretary of State’s county tables and rejecting stale single-county snapshots as not reflective of the 2025 moment [2] [3].
4. How one would produce the definitive county ranking using the referenced materials
To determine which California counties have the highest share of NPP voters using the referenced dataset, one must download the Report of Registration county tables for the relevant snapshot (February 2025 as cited), compute NPP registered voters divided by total registered voters for each county, and then sort by that percentage. The supplied summaries confirm that the necessary data exists in those official tables but that the summaries themselves did not perform that per-county calculation, so the correct approach is arithmetic on the county rows of the Secretary of State file rather than relying on the abstracts provided here [1] [2].
5. Conflicting signals and potential agendas in the available snippets
The materials originate from administrative data and secondary commentary; the Secretary of State summaries aim to document registration counts neutrally, while the other materials emphasize trends or local demographics. The presence of an outdated county page (Siskiyou, 2021) suggests a local-maintenance lag that could be used selectively to argue either stability or change in county-level partisanship depending on intent. Because each source is partial, any actor claiming a county-level ranking without showing the per-county computation should be treated skeptically: numbers exist to settle the question but were not presented in these summaries [1] [3] [5].
6. What remains uncertain and the precise next steps to answer the user’s question
Uncertainty remains only because the provided analyses did not include the computed per-county percentages; there is no contradiction about statewide NPP share, only a missing drilldown. The concrete next step is to extract the county rows from the February 2025 Report of Registration cited and compute the NPP/total-registered ratio for each county, then rank counties by that ratio. Doing so would produce a verifiable list and resolve the user’s query; the present materials indicate the path but stop short of delivering the requested ranked county percentages [1] [2].
7. Bottom line for readers who need an immediate answer and how to verify it
The bottom line is: statewide NPP = 22.3% in early 2025, but the county ranking is not provided in these excerpts and requires simple calculations on the Secretary of State’s county tables referenced here. To verify, users should download the Report of Registration county spreadsheet for the February 2025 snapshot, compute NPP as a share of each county’s registered voters, and sort; any authoritative claim about “which counties have the highest percentage” should cite those per-county calculations rather than the high-level summaries supplied [1] [2].