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Independent voter registration is surging. They are now the largest group of voters in nine states and the second largest group of registered voters in most others. More and more new voters are registering as independents, and national identification as independent is approaching half the electorate.
We have gotten used to talking about this as a story of voters leaving the Democratic and Republican parties. It is. But that is only half the story.
There are millions of Americans sitting inside those parties who don’t really think they belong there.
Some are registered Democrats or Republicans because they live in closed-primary states and want to vote. Some haven’t bothered to change their registration. There are probably as many reasons for the mismatch as there are voters.
What matters is that the mismatch is getting bigger, and we are blind to it.
Wisconsin is a good example of the problem. Two polls shortly before its Democratic gubernatorial primary had Francesca Hong ahead of David Crowley by roughly 20 points. Crowley won by about half a percentage point.
There are plenty of reasons a poll can miss a race like this. Wisconsin’s primary was low-turnout. The race changed quickly. Voters moved late. None of that makes the miss less striking. It should make us wonder whether we are getting too comfortable with the categories we use to model voters.
Navigator Research just found that 55% of Americans identify as independent. Forty-seven percent identify as Democrats and 44% as Republicans. Those numbers overlap. Americans increasingly describe themselves in more than one way; Navigator found that the average respondent identified with seven different political labels.
New York City offers an even clearer window into what this looks like.
An IVC Media poll of registered Democrats found that only 40% called themselves proud Democrats. Thirty-nine percent said they were actually independents who had registered as Democrats so they could vote in the Democratic primary. Among Latino Democrats, just one in three said they considered themselves Democrats.
That is a remarkable number. Nearly four out of every 10 people the voter file calls Democrats say they are not Democrats.
Mike Madrid has been making a related argument about California’s Latino voters. He points to the growth of Latino independent registration alongside the growth of the Latino electorate and argues that the two trends are increasingly connected. Latino voters, he writes, are unaffiliating from both parties faster than any racial or ethnic group in the country.
We have only begun talking about the people who leave the parties. We are ignoring entirely the people who stay registered with them but no longer see themselves as party members.
That matters because so much of American politics is built on the assumption that the party label tells us something fundamental about the voter. It determines who campaigns call, who pollsters put in which bucket and how parties think about their own constituencies.
What happens when it doesn’t?
It means we can have a voter file full of Democrats who don’t identify as Democrats, and Republicans who don’t identify as Republicans. We can have campaigns talking to their “base” without really knowing who the base is. And we can have pollsters trying to model an electorate using labels that voters themselves have stopped treating as fixed.
This also puts the fight over closed primaries in a different light.
The argument for keeping primaries closed is usually about protecting the integrity of the parties. But that argument assumes that the people carrying a party registration actually constitute a coherent party membership.
Increasingly, they don’t.
The lines have already been blurred by the voters themselves. An independent who registers as a Democrat because that is the only way to vote in a closed primary is evidence of that. So is a registered Republican who tells a pollster, “I’m really an independent.”
The point isn’t that one of these voters is more important than the other. It is that we are looking at both and calling only one of them independent.
Independent voters are everywhere now. The political class has just barely begun understanding the independents who leave the parties. We need to also start paying attention to the independents who stay.
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