This cycle, Blue America endorsed 2 progressives running as independents rather than as Democrats— House candidate Jason Call in Washington state and Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn. Polling shows Osborn leading— yes, leading in blood red Nebraska where Trump won 91 out of 93 counties and where Biden won just 39.4%! He gets invited to speak at both Democratic Party committee meetings and Republican Party committee meetings! He told me he gives the same stump speech at both. These are the most current voters registration numbers in Nebraska (this month):
Republican- 605,326
Democrat- 330,410
Non-partisan- 271,360
On Friday, David Siders, in writing about Colorado Springs and Yemi Mobolade, its Nigerian-born independent mayor (first non-Republican to ever win), mentioned that independents are a majority of voters in El Paso County (where Colorado Springs is the county seat). “In the last two decades,” wrote Siders, “party affiliation nationwide has been on a downward trajectory, and the percentage of Americans who consider themselves political independents has been on the rise. The proportion of Americans who identify as independent now registers at about 43 percent, according to Gallup, while only about 27 percent of Americans identify as Republican and another 27 percent as Democratic. In Colorado, the percentage of independents is even higher— about 48 percent— and if current trends hold, they may one day surpass the number of Democrats and Republicans combined.
For all the attention that third parties are drawing nationally this cycle, some people don’t see the rise of political independents as a threat to the country’s dominant political parties. One reason is that research has long suggested most independent voters lean toward on of the two major parties. But partisan lean and partisan affiliation are two very different things— and what is happening in Colorado Springs suggests to even longtime political operatives in Colorado that the party system as they know it may be starting to fall apart.
It’s not so much that voters’ values are changing. It’s that here and around the country, they are removing themselves from the party-led political process. And we’re only beginning to understand the ramifications. It’s one reason that the two parties may be increasingly beholden to fringe figures and less responsive to what voters say are their actual concerns.
The parties are struggling to figure out how to respond. When I stopped in Denver on my way to Colorado Springs, Dick Wadhams, a former Colorado Republican Party chair and longtime party strategist, told me that the mayoral election and registration surge of unaffiliated voters in El Paso County had sent “shockwaves” through the ranks of political professionals in the state.
If trends continue, he said, “it might come down that political parties are bit players,” helping to push policy positions or organize increasingly small factions of the vote.
He grimaced. He’d spent his entire professional life in party politics.
“I mean, I’ve loved being part of the two-party process,” he told me. But for young voters in particular, Wadhams said, “I’m convinced that they don’t care about it. They look beyond that.”
He said, “Campaigns and candidates are going to have to totally retool how they do things.”
The next day in Colorado Springs, about an hour’s drive south of Denver, I walked into a small Democratic Party headquarters where they already are.
…When Pew Research Center polled Americans last year, just 4 percent said the political system was working extremely or very well, and more than a quarter of Americans said they dislike both political parties— the worst reading in three decades.
…If older, more moderate Republicans in Colorado Springs have turned unaffiliated during the Trump era because they’re “sick of it,” said Richard Skorman, an unaffiliated but left-leaning former city councilmember, it’s younger voters who are the challenge for Democrats: “Young people don’t always go along with everything that the Democratic Party proposes,” he said. In both their ideology and their lives— avoiding telephone calls and party fundraising appeals— he said, they seem to prefer more “flexibility.”
Earlier in the week, NPR reported that young people don’t want to vote for Biden again. The University of Chicago’s latest GenForward survey “found that just one-third of all young Americans said they would back Biden if the election was held at the time the survey was conducted. The poll also reflects a virtual tie in the race. Biden leads former President Donald Trump by just two points, and 34% of respondents are currently backing a third-party candidate or said they would support ‘someone else.’” The reason is dissatisfaction with their place in the economy.
In 2020, 89% of Black voters aged 18-29 voted for Biden, as well as 78% of those aged 30-44. In the latest GenForward survey, just 33% said they would support him if the election were held today and 23% chose Trump.
Trump is beating Biden among young Latino voters by a four-point margin. It’s a significant drop in support for Biden compared to four years ago, when he won 69% of Latino voters under 30, and 62% of those 30-44.
When looking at a sample of only registered voters, the numbers improve for Biden and push him back ahead of Trump with Latinos, but the margins remain slim. Biden’s support with Black voters only ticks up two points to 35%.
“Young people are saying to Joe Biden, ‘win me, win my vote,’” said Cathy Cohen, a professor at the University of Chicago who founded and leads the GenForward poll. “'Don't assume I'm going to vote for you now.'”
That statement rings true particularly for individuals still searching for a different candidate, even as the presidential primary season is virtually finished. Among both Black and Latino Americans, about a quarter said they would vote for someone else.
Trump is exhibiting next to no interest in independents or swing voters and is instead putting all of his toxic energy into a turnout strategy aimed at juicing up turnout among the MAGAdonians. Yesterday Lisa Kashinsky wrote about Trump’s revenge threats, which go over well with the MAGA base amdreally badly among everyone else.
“If Republicans,” she wrote, “had any hope of Trump tempering his hard-line rhetoric in an effort to win back more moderate voters he lost to Joe Biden in 2020— something more traditionalist Republicans have pushed for— his post-conviction messaging shows the former president may be unwilling to do so… ‘It is easy for Donald Trump to convince his most ardent supporters that first they stole the election and now they’re trying to put me away for good,’ said Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in the state. But for the moderate, right-leaning independents Trump will need to win the general election, Marson said, ‘it’s incumbent on Trump to give them a bit more reason’ to vote for him. ‘Talk to us about how you are going to bring down gas prices or bring down interest rates or bring down inflation.’”
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