Percentage of Independents Reaches Yet Another Record High

Since 1988, Gallup has been asking Americans how they
self-identify: as Democrats, as Republicans, or as independents?
The trend lines are unmistakable:

Clear enough for ya? ||| Gallup

And just like
last January
, the polling organization’s results for the prior
year show a
record percentage going indy
:

Forty-two percent of Americans, on average, identified as
political independents in 2013, the highest Gallup has measured
since it began conducting interviews by telephone 25 years ago.
Meanwhile, Republican identification fell to 25%, the lowest over
that time span. At 31%, Democratic identification is unchanged from
the last four years but down from 36% in 2008.

These results are bad news for the party of Barack Obama….

The current 31% of Americans identifying as Democrats matches
the lowest annual average in the last 25 years.

….And they are bad news for Republicans, who—amazingly—have
failed to gain while the rest of America continues to lose under
the Democratic president:

When [George W. Bush] left office, Republican identification was
down to 28%. It has declined or stagnated since then, improving
only slightly to 29% in 2010, the year Republicans “shellacked”
Democrats in the midterm elections.

Not only are the trend lines clear over the past quarter
century, they’re clear over the past 12 months:

Clear enough for ya? ||| Gallup

As the Gallup write-up points out,

The 46% independent identification in the fourth quarter is a
full three percentage points higher than Gallup has measured in any
quarter during its telephone polling era.

Those commentators who still self-identify with one of the two
dwindling major tribes will surely contend that a 42 percent
independents number will not soon translate into anything like a 42
percent vote for a third party, nor does it mean there’s a 42
percent bloc of centrists, or libertarians, or any other monolithic
grouping of jackalopes. All of which is true.

Did you know we wrote a book? |||But as Nick Gillespie and I argue in
The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix
What’s Wrong With America
(a distillation of which you can
read in the
August 2011 issue
of Reason), the economy/society-wide
loss of brand loyalty and gain of individualized, tech-fueled
disruption will hit politics and especially governance
last, because of government’s guaranteed revenue streams
and party-rigged insulation from competition. But just because it
will happen last, doesn’t mean it isn’t already beginning to
happen. Here’s a bit from that magazine excerpt, all of 29 months
ago:  

Where will the next political smart mob, the next online swarm,
come from? Look wherever there is too broad a gap between the two
major political parties and their bases. One good short-term bet is
the issue of rolling back the drug war, which professional
Democrats from the president on down openly mock while a growing
number of Republicans (such as presidential candidates Ron Paul and
Gary Johnson) gain surprising support by uttering the
unspeakable.

Looking pretty prescient now, right?

Gallup routinely finds fed-up voters leaning increasingly
libertarian on a
whole host of issues
. Even non-libertarians like Charles
Krauthammer
express something like awe
at how quickly libertarian
impulses—particularly those that professional politicians have long
blunted—are
gaining the upper hand
. Voters who act like free agents are
inherently difficult to herd, and are capable of producing sudden,
dynamic change. As Gallup muses:

The increased independence adds a greater level of
unpredictability to this year’s congressional midterm elections.
Because U.S. voters are less anchored to the parties than ever
before, it’s not clear what kind of appeals may be most effective
to winning votes. But with Americans increasingly eschewing party
labels for themselves, candidates who are less closely aligned to
their party or its prevailing doctrine may benefit.

Expect some discussion on this topic on tonight’s episode of
The
Independents
.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2014/01/08/percentage-of-independents-reaches-yet-a
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