Submitted by Claire Bernish via TheAntiMedia.org, [3]
More people in the United States than ever are breaking away from the political duopoly by refusing to self-identify as either Democrat or Republican — and they now effectively comprise the true silent majority: Independents.
According to a Gallup poll [4] released Monday, for 2015, just 29% of respondents call themselves Democrats, while 26% identify as Republicans — but fully 42% say ‘nay’ to both parties and claim to be Independents, down only marginally from 43% last year. Indeed, Independents as a group reached 40% of the population for the first time in 2011, and have comprised at least that percentage since then.
[5]
Before Gallup began polling by phone in 1988, “there were several years when the average percentage of Republican identifiers … was lower than 25%.” But for Democrats, that self-identification reached a 27-year low, down from the previous year’s 30% — and because “data from 1951-1987 collected in person never found a yearly average Democratic identification less than 37%,” it is “safe to conclude that the current 29% is also the lowest in Gallup polling history.”
When pressed further, 16% of Independents admitted leaning Democratic and another 16% admitted a Republican tendency, evidencing the weight of the two-party system on voters’ feelings, as Gallup pointed out, “because in most elections, voters are asked to choose a candidate from one of the two parties.”
What could explain this virtual nadir in party identification? It’s the gub’ment, stupid.
For the second year in a row, exasperation with the government topped the U.S. populace’s list of pressing grievances in a separate Gallup poll [6]. They named it the nation’s number one problem more often than the ubiquitous ‘economy.’ In fact, of the last 15 years, the economy was the top complaint eight times — including each of the six years prior to the government, itself, taking first place in 2014.
With party fervor inevitably headed for a crescendo with the 2016 presidential race in full swing, perhaps the lackluster red and blue loyalty evidences the precursor to a shift. Imagine the possibilities should this silently growing majority decide to cast votes outside the two-party platform. Maybe, just maybe, these Independents have begun to see the duopoly for what it is — two sides of the same tarnished coin.
