No Such Thing As Independents

As we all adjust to our new, mostly stupid rejiggered legislative and congressional districts, it's important to remember that there is no such thing as an "independent voter" who can be swayed by appeals to the mushy center.

Down with Tyranny:

Suppose there’s a swing district you-- you being a Democratic Party committee or strategist or booster-- want to win, and you have your choice of two comparably-strong candidates: one who is an Oregon. Who shows up to vote matters, and voters from both parties are more likely to show up and vote for people who they believe will fight for their values.

Republicans, realizing that it’s a lot harder to elect moderates, have essentially stopped doing so.

On our side, however, we seem to just keep throwing money at trying to elect them. Is that because leaders like Steve Israel, head of the DCCC, are themselves conservatives? Or because they're idiots? I'm still trying to figure that out. The answer is probably "both."

And speaking of money: it costs a lot more money to elect a “centrist” than a progressive. In August, the DLC’s think tank PPI published a study showing that it costs about twice as much to elect centrists than progressives.

It’s harder to elect centrists than progressives. They’re more likely to lose, and they’re more expensive to elect. So in what way, exactly, are they theoretically more electable?

If you want to win, support the progressive. How do you know who the progressive candidates are? Blue America doesn't endorse generic Democrats, let alone conservatives or Blue Dogs. We endorse progressives like Norman Solomon, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, Alan Grayson, Darcy Burner, Franke Wilmer, Bernie Sanders and Ilya Sheyman. You can find our list of House candidates here and our Senate candidates here.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

Dave Johnson wrote a great piece back in May showing that appealing to the center actually drives away voters. Now he finds more evidence to support his position:

On NPR's Talk of the Nation today, Clarence Page talked with host Neal Conan about the role of independent voters, saying that we might be surprised to learn that candidates who try to appeal to "independents" tend to lose, because they turn off the voters who closely follow and care about the issues.

In fact, candidates who try to "appeal to the center" lose, because this idea of a "center" is a myth. From the transcript:

You know, there is a professor Alan Aramowitz of Emory University, who has been studying this using voting statistics, and he found that the - well, as he put it, in all three of the presidential elections since 1972 that were decided by a margin of less than five points, that the candidate backed by the independents lost. This was - this surprised me. You know, he's citing here Jimmy Carter in '76, Gerald Ford - sorry, Gerald Ford beat - excuse me, Gerald Ford won the independent vote but lost the election. Put it that way, OK.

Most independents voted for George W. Bush in 2000, but Al Gore got the overall popular vote. As you recall, he got the popular vote but not the state vote.

CONAN: Yeah, but that's fudging your statistics a little bit. The guy who got the independent vote got the big prize.

PAGE: Yeah, but still, though, most of the - the one backed by the independent voters, though, did not get the majority of the popular vote. And in 2004, John Kerry, most independents voted for John Kerry, but he lost the overall election.

What does that mean? What it means is that Karl Rove and others, who have often advocated firing up the base rather than reaching out for independents, they've got a point. In some elections, that works. If you fire up your base, get your vote out, it can be big enough that it will overwhelm the opposition and the independents, because independents also tend to have the least turnout, and they also tend to be the least committed, not just to a party but also to - well, less engaged with the whole campaign.

From January, Steve Benen:

Gallup has a new report out this morning on how Americans identify themselves when it comes to political party. The results are generating a fair amount of interest, but I’d add a note of caution about the nature of “independents.”

Gallup finds 40% of American self-identify as independents, the highest percentage Gallup has ever measured since it began keeping track. Democrats are a distant second with 31%, with Republicans third at 27%.

What this doesn’t tell us, though, is that the definition of “independent” is far too vague to be of any real value. John Sides had a piece a few years ago that’s worth revisiting.

[H]ere is the problem: Most independents are closet partisans. This has been well-known in political science since at least 1992, with the publication of The Myth of the Independent Voter.

When asked a follow-up question, the vast majority of independents state that they lean toward a political party. They are the “independent leaners.” … The number of pure independents is actually quite small — perhaps 10% or so of the population. And this number has been decreasing, not increasing, since the mid-1970s. […]

The significance of independent leaners is this: they act like partisans…. There is very little difference between independent leaners and weak partisans. Approximately 75% of independent leaners are loyal partisans.

Note that the new Gallup poll shows 40% of Americans self-identify as independents, but when leaners are pressed into one side or the other, the number drops to 10% — exactly where Sides said the number would be when he wrote this more than two years ago.

A variety of pundits will frequently characterize “independents” as a group of “moderate” or “centrist” voters — as if the right sides with Republicans, the left sides with Democrats, and the middle stays “independent.”

That’s a common belief, but it’s also wrong. The Washington Post published a lengthy analysis of political independents in July 2007, based on a survey conducted by the Post in collaboration with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. The result was a pretty straightforward reminder: there’s an enormous amount of political diversity among independents.

The survey data established five categories of independents: closet partisans on the left and right; ticket-splitters in the middle; those disillusioned with the system but still active politically; ideological straddlers whose positions on issues draw from both left and right; and a final group whose members are mostly disengaged from politics.

The new Gallup numbers shouldn’t change our sense of the current political landscape much at all.

In other words, at least 90 percent of voters are partisans - they at least lean either Democratic or repug. Which means, as always, that the key is turnout. If every voter who at least leans Democratic votes, Democrats win. If every voter who at least leans repug votes, repugs will lose - unless Democratic voters sit home and don't vote.