How do you determine your political affiliations?

It seems, this latest US election has made the faces of a certain party—at least, the loudest ones, the most prominent in pop media—look rather pathetic (and frighteningly believed/supported.) Sure, politicians pander…but how can anyone seemingly think they can go spend about two years (I think it was two, it felt like two,) of campaigning whatever slogan they think is convenient for whatever week, whatever ears, and not have what they said the previous week still be bouncing between neurons, or captured in bytes? That comes off to me as horribly arrogant. It also bothers me how easy it seems for someone to call themself, be called, a certain political mindset, and have that mean they can disregard the right of others to enjoy rights the one already has or doesn’t have to consider. Watching people acting as idiots, and/or being incredibly insulting and insensitive—then watching them have support and votes because of that behavior—I don’t understand. But while I feel I see it most in a specific party, my question is more general.

I’ve heard, particularly of late, how many people are frustrated with the faces of their party; how those faces are disfiguring the party’s higher ideals, misrepresenting, smearing, harming. But, identifying still with the party, the person votes for the politician they feel is (mis)representing it anyway. Why?

Regardless of the ideals a party attempts to, claims, they carry (or a person believes they carry)—it seems to me, that it’s the people that represent the party who matter the most. Those are the people who will be trying for election, trying to guide the country toward their way of thinking. Those are the people who are positioned to get the funding and the support and the positions. And so that’s the thinking I use to approach the ballot box, and to pick up the pen, and to choose which arrow to connect. It’s also why I’m registered an independent. I am unable to attach myself to a specific party, adhere their label to my chest, and find myself moral in doing so. I like to know what groups a politician thinks they’re representing, what cluster of people are backing them monetarily, but I don’t ever want the abstract to be the reason I vote for the actual.

Conversely, a party associating itself with people openly discriminating and denying rights, or blatanly lying, I have difficulty trusting. And I also don’t want a face, to be the reason I vote for the same arrogant group of individuals backing them; that seems to be the same ‘actual,’ merely repackaged: new look, same great taste!) So I think I understand the conflict, to an extent.

What I’m really trying to understand, is how much of a party’s to-do list or belief set do you personally need to agree with before you affiliate with them? What are you okay with compromising? What is absolutely necessary? What, who, is your loyalty preserved for, and presented against? How far can you feel the leaders of your party stray before you abandon the party, or at least protest and boycott the leaders? How do you decide who to trust your country with?

Where in the political obscurity is the actual disagreement(s), the junction dividing, people into parties?