In other words, if there's a record-high number of independents, how much of it is "market failure" where people want more options than the usual 2 parties?
No. They are almost always fairly tightly and heavily lockstep aligned with the Republican party.
My fiance has a few friends in the dating scene. Their comments mirror this: "If someone has "apolitical/I'm not into politics/centerist" on their profile you can generally assume they are quite conservative.
According to the article, 27% of independents describe themselves as conservative (not to mention the 20% of Republicans who describe themselves as moderate). Also, the article talks about the "Republican-leaning independents" category, so I'm not sure about the basis for skepticism here.
Nobody is denying the existence of this phenomenon. And there's perhaps good reason for people to eschew identification with political parties, which are corrupt in various ways, though one may hold one's nose and vote for some major party candidate on election day.
I dispute the "always" claim, however, which appears to be based on your own anecdotal experience. I would trust Gallup polling more than that. Moreover, the existence of the Green party for example would appear to be proof that independent does not equate with conservative/Republican. The Libertarian party of course gets votes too.
Conservative has remained more or less static the whole time, 36% in 1992, 35% in 2025, which I guess makes a kind of sense, while moderate has dropped 10%, with a corresponding increase in liberal.
I would personally call this social progress, though of course conservatives would disagree. On the other hand, the specific political policies supported by self-described conservatives and liberals has sometimes changed radically over those years, which can make my eyes roll and my head spin—for example, I remember a time when conservatives were free-trade internationalists—so I think it's a separate question whether US political policy itself has become too conservative or too liberal. In any case, the leaders of both parties tend to advance the interests of themselves and their donors over the interests of their voters or the public at large.
I've come to see political parties, political ideologies, and even religions more as social groups than as repositories for specific beliefs, where the identity and attitude of the members is more important than consistency, logic, or truth.