Percentage Of Americans Identifying As Political Independents Reaches All-Time High In Gallup Poll
Meanwhile, Republicans manage to translate three years of miserable Obama/Democrat control of Washington DC into an even smaller share of the political market:
The most recent upward trend in people identifying as independents starts in 2004, which would jive with something pollster Scott Rasmussen wrote in the Wall Street Journal back in 2010, which is that Americans have been voting against the status quo in election cycle after election cycle.
They vote against Democrats when they’re in power, and they vote against Republicans when they’re in power.
Rasmussen said the trend really started in the early 1990′s with Bill Clinton, but that the rate of turnover between parties seems to be increasing. I think it indexes to how increasingly visible the government is in our day-to-day lives.
The bigger government gets, the more government red tape we deal with in our lives, the more resent government whoever happens to be in charge at the moment. Couple that with the internet serving as a platform for the exchange of more speech and information than any other time in the history of humankind, and you have a recipe for a sea change in American politics.
Or, at least, what I hope is a sea change.
Tags: gallup, party affiliation, party identification, polls, voter registration
