Moving On

The ranks of the unaffiliated voter have grown as the country has become more mobile, more suburban and less attached to political parties. Will this movement grow large enough to disrupt the seesaw nature of American politics over the past 100 years?

Through the first half of the 20th century, national politics was dominated first by the Republicans, then -- after the onset of the Depression -- by the Democrats. One party or the other tended to monopolize power as straight-ticket voting was the norm.

After World War II, the country and its politics began to change as a large number of voters relocated from small towns and central cities to new, politically rootless suburbs. Independents emerged as a visible factor, helping trigger a new era of split-ticket voting and divided government. Republicans won the presidency more often than Democrats; Democrats held a nearly unbroken grip on both houses of Congress.

Over the last dozen years, the continued growth in independent voters has helped launch a whole new period in American politics, the basic dynamic of which can be summed up in three words -- expect the unexpected.

In the 1990s, a Democrat won two terms in the White House for the first time in a half-century. But the Republicans broke the Democratic hold on the House and the Senate. Meanwhile, independent and third-party presidential candidates -- of only occasional significance for most of the 20th century -- have regularly tallied millions of votes. And the 2000 election culminated with a historical rarity, an electoral college "misfire." For the first time in more than a century, one candidate won the electoral vote and another took the popular vote.

For the immediate future, the registration trends point to more of the same -- an increasingly untethered electorate that gives party strategists more to worry about than marshaling their base vote.

In terms of registration, the Democrats are on a downward slide, living off the fumes of the New Deal era when they were the nation's majority party. Now, at best, they are the plurality party. Yet the Republicans have not been able to rush into the vacuum. Since the last cicada outbreak, their share of voters in the party-registration states has remained stuck at one-third. Republicans hold a registration advantage in just seven small or mid-sized states (compared to the Democrats' edge in 13, including several of the most populous). All of the "GOP seven" are west of the Mississippi River; Arizona, with 10 electoral votes, is the largest.

Meanwhile, the trend among voters who don't identify with either party is the reverse of that among Democrats. Since 1987, the proportion of unaffiliated voters has grown in every region and every party-registration state but two (Colorado and Kansas). These "other" voters are a plurality in a quartet of New England states (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire), plus New Jersey, Iowa and Alaska. In this year's presidential election, Iowa, Maine and New Hampshire are already considered battleground states.

What might a continued rise in independent voters portend for American politics beyond 2004? One appealing thought is that it might bring increased comity to an electoral process that badly needs it. At least that is what seems to have happened in states such as Maine and Colorado, where the registered electorate has been closely divided for years among Democrats, Republicans and independents.

Candidates in both states employ slash-and-burn tactics at their peril. Rip-roaring partisanship and negative campaigning may be commonplace in much of the country. But in Maine and Colorado, the surest route to victory is to tone down the partisanship and smooth the ideological edges in order to appeal to the broad mass of independents.

Voters in Colorado have quite literally shown that they vote the person rather than the party, electing Ben Nighthorse Campbell to the Senate in 1992 as a Democrat, then electing him to a second term as a Republican. Meanwhile, Maine has elected two independent governors in the last 30 years, one of them for two terms; Olympia J. Snowe, the state's senior senator, is considered one of the most independent-minded Republicans in Congress.

There is little doubt that the rise of the unaffiliated has had a moderating influence on who gets elected in both states. Ted Kennedy Democrats are hard to find in either. So are Tom DeLay Republicans. For those of us who worry about a future defined by the sharp shadings of Red and Blue America, perhaps there is hope in contemplating what might happen if the politics of states such as Maine and Colorado were to go national in the years ahead.

Author's e-mail:rhodescook@aol.com

Rhodes Cook analyzes political trends at RhodesCook.com and publishes a bimonthly newsletter. He is co-author of "America Votes," Congressional Quarterly's biennial summary of national election results.