His patriotic party anthems got him favor with die-hard conservatives, but Toby Keith played the political field pretty heavily. He crossed party lines to do events for presidents on both sides, including George W. Bush and Barack Obama — who he may have voted for, by the way. After all, despite public perceptions of him, Keith praised then-presidential candidate Obama in 2008 in speaking to the Associated Press.
“I think he’s the best Democratic candidate we’ve had since Bill Clinton,” Keith told AP (via Wired). “And that’s coming from a Democrat.” In fact, Keith was a registered Democrat for years, he explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2016. But political labels weren’t his thing, and he changed to being an Independent in 2016. “It just keeps people off balance,” Keith told the Chicago Tribune of changing parties. “They don’t know what to think. They see you hanging out with Willie Nelson or Sammy Hagar, they go, ‘What the hell are these people thinking?’ They don’t know you. They just want to label you.”
Something else he told the Chicago Tribune is that he no longer felt welcome in the Democratic party because of his support of the military. Besides writing patriotic songs as a means of supporting the troops, Keith also went on 18 USO tours.
