Swingers

It's conventional wisdom in the political press that "independent" voters are something of a mythical creature. People say that they're independent, but their voting behavior tends line up solidly behind one party or the other. For myself, I dropped any idea that I was an independent some time ago, in favor of describing myself as a "not Republican." And this mainly because while I don't really identify with either party, in the grand scheme of things, I do consider it important to vote in every election in which I can manage it. And since there are very few Republicans in the vicinity who come across as something other than a cheerleader for social conservatism, business primacy or just opposing whatever the Democrats happen to be for this week, I rarely find one worth voting for.

And I wonder if, from the point of view of the parties, themselves, that's a feature, not a bug. As the two parties move farther and farther from one another, the idea that it's possible to find people on both sides of the divide that one can agree with becomes more and more remote. And so voting means finding the people that one agrees with the most, and picking them. And to the degree that the parties cluster closely with co-partisans, but at a substantial distance from everyone else, an increase in straight-ticket voting would seem to be almost inevitable.

Maybe it makes it easier for the parties to garner votes when they can get low-motivation citizens to the polls, because they'll vote for one party all the way across, rather then splitting their votes. I don't really know. But the once-lauded "swing voter" seems to be a thing of the past, primarily because the gulf between partisans has become too wide to easily swing across.