Monday, January 8, 2018

Gallup Finds 42% are Politically "Independent" (But It's Not Really 42%)

It's time once again, when folks will point to today's Gallup Poll findings that in 2017, "42% of Americans, on average, identified as political independents, erasing the decline to 39% seen in the 2016 presidential election year." This will be heralded as the continued demise of political parties, when it comes to partisan identification, and calls will be brought forth for "see, it's time for a third party!"

Well, I hate to burst the bubble this early in the new year, but if you can skim beyond the first graph of the release, you'll find that most Americans "lean" to one party over the other. When you combine the two groups (partisan identifiers + partisan leaners), then you'll see a very different story:

So when you take the 29 percent Democratic partisan identifiers and add the 18 percent independents who lean Democratic, then take the 27 percent Republican partisan identifiers and add the 15 percent independents who lean Republican, you'll find a 47-42 split among partisan identifiers and only 11 percent who aren't partisan (i.e., pure independents).

Why is this so important? Here's a graphic that I constantly use to prove the point that, maybe, just perhaps, these "independent leaners" aren't so independent as we think they are:

Per the American National Election Study from 2016's presidential election, independent partisans voted 80 percent for their leaning party's presidential candidate. Meanwhile, those "strong" partisans voted 95 percent plus likely for their party's candidate, while "not very strong"partisans voted 75 percent for their party's candidate.

Update: and if one thinks 2016 was an odd case (it was in terms of the 3rd party voting by pure independents), here's the data from 2012's ANES: 

Are independents who lean to a political party really independent? How about we just call them what they are: faux independents.