Independent voters – who are they?
Nowadays it seems that a wide sociopolitical spectrum describes the set of U.S. independent voters. The techniques for defining them and counting them seem nebulous at best. Of course, it’s hard to do the second if you haven’t done the first. There are true independents, people who will not make a decision until the day of the election, for parties or people, although they will taunt you by saying that they tend to lean one way or the other. There are the shifters, people who say they are Dems and vote GOP or vice versa. Others will vote in one election and not another or not in primaries (in some states you can’t vote in primaries if you haven’t declared a nominal party allegiance). Finally, some are third party voters who don’t vote unless they have a candidate (Socialists, Libertarians, etc)—they’re for an “independent party.”
There are two urban legends about independent voters that are amusing. One is that they determine the outcome of elections. The other is that they can be wooed. We can dispense with the first legend only if we count non-voters as voters. An election is decided by the people who don’t show up to vote as often as those who do. Voter turnout in the U.S. has varied from 80+% in the late 1800’s to just less than 50% not many years ago. No matter the percentage of registered voters who actually vote, these non-voters would decide an election only if they went unanimously for one candidate in a close election, a highly unlikely event. The only case where election outcomes are changed by real voters result when a third party candidate has enough following in a state to win some electoral votes there (like Perot and Nader, for example), affecting a close election.
That other bit of electoral folklore can be dispensed with by observing that a person is wooable (to coin a word that sounds like we’re discussing Daffy Duck) only if he’s undecided and truly sitting on the proverbial fence rail. Most people have electoral preferences even if they declare themselves as independents. During an election the ubiquitous refrain “I voted for the lesser of two evils” is often heard as our two-party system forces civic-minded people to not waste their vote and finally decide for someone. That decision a fortiori means they have a preference. Their independence is only a farce. Even the person that is so disgusted with the whole political process that he or she refuses to participate (and there are many so-called independents who fit this description) is being preferential.
All of the above are not wooable. Their minds are already made up and nothing any candidate says will make a difference. The generalization and broadening of who can vote with absentee and mail-in ballots destroys this urban legend even more. Independent voters, in general, have made up their minds—they just want to keep their decisions private. How these people react to last-minute and exit polls is another question. I imagine there are sociology and political science theses to be written here.
The categories of Democrats, Republicans, and independents are just too general and have become an albatross around the neck of our democracy. Even the traditional parties have too broad a range of interests and priorities and we have just seen that there are many ways for a voter to be “independent.” The winner-take-all Electoral College system shares a lot of the blame, of course. It exacerbates the problem associated with a slim majority declaring a mandate and assuming they have free rein to tyrannize the minority. In fact, it allows a block of sparsely populated states to wield disproportionate power. A much better system would be to decide national elections by strict popular vote.
The Electoral College system also promotes a two-party system. In a multi-party system, it often happens that no party gets a clear majority. In fact, for an N-party system, the statistical tendency would be to have each party get about 100/N per cent of the votes (which is why the losing party in any of our elections rarely falls below 45%). In Europe this makes for lively discussions in parliaments, something we also have in the U.S. while at the same time we try to force the round peg into a square hole by calling one side of an issue Democratic or Republican. Europeans recognize the breadth of human opinion and revel in it. We try like hell to avoid it. I have no problem deciding which system is more democratic. Democracy is organized chaos which, is why, I suppose conservatives often prefer fascism.
Given that the independent voter doesn’t really exist, it is not surprising that in Europe there are none. People often switch allegiances in a given election, of course, which is a kind of independence (see the “shifters” above), but the general rule is that winning majorities are formed by coalitions between parties. Moreover, our country’s peculiar chaotic and dirty history that led to the Democratic and Republican parties is more ideologically pure in Europe where one party or group of parties is conservative and another is liberal—in fact, more often than not, the two major parties are the Conservatives and Liberals. Semantics is irrelevant here, but purity of purpose is not. An European party often has a well-defined platform. The only party in the U.S. with corresponding purity and clarity is the Libertarian Party.
Perhaps it’s not so amazing that the Libertarians made such great strides during the last midterm elections for this reason. Under the Tea Party disguise, many congressional freshmen (and freshwomen) wound up in Washington with a well-defined platform for change. As a progressive, I can’t agree with their ideology, but I can admire their clarity of purpose. We need more of this if our democracy is going to survive. Only by providing each voting American with a clear party choice and then brokering compromise to achieve a majority and to wield power will we reach the maturity of the European democracies. The Libertarians have been successful in representing a very vocal segment of our population. I challenge the more progressive elements of our society to do the same. Then let true democracy begin.
