re: Lets Talk Politics

I also disagree that independents really exist. People naturally favor one type of thinking or another and thus naturally gravitate to one party or the other, it's just that a lot of people answer pollsters wanting to maintain their personal independence/aloofness and be non-committal and non-confrontational or "cool" by saying they are "independents". But the reality is that, of the people who actually vote, 99% of them tend to always vote for one party or the other. Of the so-called independents who actually vote, if you ask them who they voted for the last election and the one before that and the one before that, you will see that they are for all intents and purposes solid Rs or solid Ds in how they vote, they just SAY they are independents. It's the biggest misconception in politics. There is such a thing as a crossover voter - the factory worker in Ohio who previously always voted D who crossed over to vote for Reagan, for example - but the take-home point there is that they always voted D before - not that they were some "independent" who voted D, then R, then D, then D, then R - because despite the commonly-held notion that such voters exist to be "captured", there's really no such voter.

The reality is that each party has a pool of people naturally aligned with them who may or may not actually go vote depending on who the candidate is with no separate pool of independents. The race is typically won, not by capturing the mythical independents, but by getting the people naturally aligned with you to identify with your candidate, like him, and be motivated to actually show up and vote for him. That's why Barack won and McCain and Romney lost. Barack's people liked him and came out. Most people on the right dislike McCain and Romney just didn't move the needle, so a lot of them stayed home. The "third way" is when one party has an unappealing candidate and you have one who shines so bright he actually appeals to traditional voters of the other party (Reagan) and you get crossovers in a landslide. But those are crossovers, not independents. When that candidate is gone they will go back to consistently voting for the party they did before.