Will independent voters split? Or will they swing? Only a few years ago, the question seemed barely worth asking. This year, the answer may well decide the election.
On paper, independents make up about a third of the electorate. Until recently, however, they were becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of American politics: They got no respect. Political scientists dismissed them as comparatively apathetic and ill-informed. Political strategists dismissed them as behaving more like closet partisans than swing voters. In both 2000 and 2004, independents split their vote fairly evenly, effectively neutralizing themselves. A political era seemed to have dawned in which both parties played to their base supporters and, in the process, alienated and divided independents, pushing them to the sidelines.
Then, in 2006, independents swung -- and swung hard. Angry about Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and corruption, they broke for the Democrats by a margin of almost 20 percentage points and turned both houses of Congress blue. The lesson was that independents are bimodal: marginal when split or passive, but decisive when angry.
This year, they appear to be angry. In February, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a Democratic polling and research firm, studied swing voters in swing states and found them choleric. "The anger of this independent electorate has not abated since the 2006 elections," the company reported. By August, independents were nearly indistinguishable from Democrats in their overwhelming judgment -- by 80 percent to 17 percent, according to a Harris Interactive poll in August -- that the country was on the wrong track.
For all of Democrat Barack Obama's vaunted crossover appeal, it was John McCain who first tapped into this independent anger. At the Republican convention, he channeled Ross Perot: a tight-fisted, anti-Washington populist. Independents responded. "John McCain's 6-percentage-point bounce in voter support spanning the Republican National Convention," the Gallup Organization reported, was "largely explained by political independents shifting to him in fairly big numbers, from 40 percent preconvention to 52 percent post-convention." The shift to McCain among "pure" independents, who display no partisan leanings, was even more impressive, from 20 percent before the convention to 39 percent afterward.
At a stroke, independents erased Obama's preconvention advantage. The point is not that these voters have made up their minds or that the race is over. The point is, rather, that their post-convention volatility suggests that they are in swing mode again this year and so could decide the election, perhaps even tipping it dramatically.
If independents break decisively for McCain, that would raise an intriguing possibility. They remain angry about the country's course under President Bush, and McCain asks them to view him and his vice presidential nominee as mavericks who are running against the Republican establishment in Washington. If independents take him at his word, they might swing for McCain while simultaneously swinging against his party, strengthening Democrats' hold on Congress even as they put a Republican in the White House. In other words, McCain might win with negative coattails.
Negative coattails are fairly rare in U.S. politics. And they usually leave the government unified (one party in control of the executive and legislative branches, though with narrower margins) or Congress split (each party controlling one chamber). Only a single election has given one party the White House while strengthening the other party's hold on both houses of Congress. And in that year, 1956, the Democrats' congressional margins increased only trivially (by one Senate seat and two House seats).
If independents break for McCain while solidly, not merely trivially, reinforcing Democrats' majorities in both chambers, that would be a split decision whose like has not been seen since -- well, ever. Making history, independents would have asserted their independence by circumscribing President McCain's.
Jonathan Rauch is a National Journal columnist.
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