What do Independents really want?
by digby
538 has the goods. It’s what we all suspected:
Gallup reported Wednesday that 43 percent of Americans identify as political independents — a record high. Thirty percent call themselves Democrats, and 26 percent call themselves Republicans. So what does this mean for our political future? Absolutely nothing.
Many of these independents are closet partisans. They say they are independent but consistently lean towards one party or the other. In Gallup’s latest survey, only 13 percent of Americans don’t favor the Democratic or Republican party. In other words, 87 percent of Americans prefer one party over the other, which is about on par with data since 1991.
Political independence isn’t more popular, it’s just more fashionable.
Ain’t that the truth. Nobody wants to be associated with the two parties. They are embarrassing in dozens of different ways. But the press commonly mistakes that identifiers as having some ideological meaning and it doesn’t. The country is politically polarized and it’s socially uncomfortable for a lot of people to take sides in the argument. So they call themselves “independents” and have it both ways in terms of personal identification. It’s much easier to do that. But in the end, their philosophies and voting patterns consistently go with one party or another. They have to — our system is very polarized and we would have to have split personalities to vote for both parties. This is not about ideology.
I get it. But the political press needs to stop assuming that people who identify as “independent” really want moderation and compromise. That’s a projection. We don’t know what they “really want.” We only know they don’t want to be identified with either party and that can mean anything.
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