The Elephant in the Room

The Biggest Voting Bloc By Far (hint: it's not Republicans or Democrats)

It's been common knowledge for many years that nobody from either party can win the White House without pulling a majority of Independent voters.

At the end of the Reagan era, Democrats outnumbered Republicans and Independents were just about midway between the two parties in percentage of voters.

But something was happening. If you look at the graph below, you'll see that the last time that Independents were on par with the big two was in 2006.

Shortly after that, social media became a thing. Facebook's story-oriented ‘newsfeed’ model put a quick end to early leader, Myspace. And Twitter’s limit of 140 characters reduced such text commentary to a blunt fist.

In 2009, Facebook introduced the ‘like’ button, and Twitter gave us the ‘retweet’. Now we could say something nasty on an internationally used public forum, and be immediately rewarded.

It shouldn’t have surprised us to see the ‘national dialogue’ turn quickly into a national shouting match.

The nastiness was nothing new. Both Fox News and MSNBC had gone live in 1996, and Rush Limbaugh and his imitators had been taking over AM talk for a decade before that.

But America’s twin Partisan Armies sat restlessly … like unused reservists. Our weapons loaded, leaning into the radio and TV, eager for the fight, memorizing our orders.

And then Facebook and Twitter called us up, and off we went to war. With each other.

Remember this old adage? “If you give a million monkeys a million typewriters, they’ll eventually reproduce the collected works of Shakespeare.”

Apparently that was too sunny a prediction.

A backward glance at the chart above shows what fifteen years of this has done to our political affiliations. Both Democrats and Republicans became hostage to their most viral elements. This has shrunk them both, while creating the largest group of political independents ever.

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In March of this year Independents came within one percentage point of being as large a factor as both major parties put together

I repeat. BOTH PARTIES PUT TOGETHER! Talk About Your Elephant in the Room!

Not only can you not win, WITHOUT the independents, but you could potentially win with ONLY the Independents.

Of course, it isn't as if those who are not party-affiliated are unified and neutral. Polls show that most of them lean one way or another.

But, I think that it's fair to say that the growth of the Indies, is directly related to the increase in online political warfare, and the general decrease in civility that’s come along with it.

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I have belonged to both parties. But now I belong to neither. Strangely, the latter might soon make me more typical than not.

The perception proffered by partisan pundits has always held that those who didn't identify with either party were disinterested. Disengaged.

But that can’t be true any longer. The swelling number of Independents, is directly correlated to the shrinking of both the blue team and the red team.

This means that a significant portion of Indies are neither disinterested nor disengaged, but are in fact disillusioned and even DISGUSTED. Not with the country or with the importance of our politics, but with PARTISANSHIP and it's ugly ways.

What if we identified this disgust as being a state of mind as valid and definable as being 'conservative' or being 'liberal'?

I don't call myself a non-partisan. I call myself a POST-partisan. It’s an important distinction. I've belonged to both parties. And I've watched each prove to be not much better than an ideological gang.

Once you have fused your identity to a political orthodoxy, you have become incapable of nuanced thought.

Investigating an issue objectively, puts you at risk of finding that what your party requires you to believe might be wrong. And if you make that finding, you now must decide between speaking up and facing social censure, or clamming up and living a lie.

So where’s the upside?

Social primates have a near-mortal fear of being expelled from the tribe. Whether that tribe gathers at the cocktail party or the barbecue. Having left both parties under heavy verbal fire, I know well how painful this sort of excommunication can be.

Perhaps this is why I see the swelling number of Independents as an exciting development. I don’t see these folks as wishy-washy fence-sitters. I see them as courageous.

Or at the least, early adopters of what I have dubbed The Post Partisan Mind.

Identifying with an ideology is a human trait. We’re stuck with it. Partisanship and the sense of purpose it brings, enlivens it’s members. Gives them a sense of purpose, however illusory.

It seems to me that having rejected one - or both - of the parties is a very different thing, from having never joined either of them. A liberal who leaves the party of her youth, has either found fault with that party, or begun to see some validity in conservative ideas. That she has not then JOINED the party of conservatives - or has joined and then left - indicates that she’s become an independent thinker.

We talk about pendulums swinging back and forth. But seldom express hope that the damn thing will just hold still.

Taking to the center is not a retreat, but a re-positioning. To an orientation that understands and embraces the best parts of the Left and The Right, while rejecting the knee-jerk hostility driven by old fashioned primal fear, as stoked by media profiteers.

It’s my hope that Independents will come to see themselves not as outsiders but something more akin to referees. People who watch the game carefully, cultivate their objectivity, and are not afraid to call foul on either team.

It's clear to me that humans would not have conquered the world if they'd not had both liberal minds and conservative minds contributing ideas.

The liberal fascination with the new, does in-fact drive innovation. And the inborn conservative skepticism about change, keeps innovation from driving us off a cliff.

Like I've said before. If two heads are better than one, it's only because two TYPES of heads are better than one.

Hopefully the growing disregard for our politics, is swelling the ranks of The Independents for the right reasons. And hopefully they will begin to apply their political heft in a more organized way.

Thanks for dropping by. Please browse the other sections of Morrison At Large, for my writing on different topics. I hope that you’ll share this article and consider subscribing. Scroll down for those options.

Yours, Dave