Independent Senate Candidates

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Anna Griffin at NYT:

During his brief time in the Idaho House of Representatives, Todd Achilles often stopped to admire a photograph from the state’s 1899 legislative session, and not just because some of the turn-of-the-century hairstyles and beards were “wild,” he said.

In the photo were lawmakers from four distinct parties, along with a handful of unaffiliated candidates.

“That was a period just like now,” Mr. Achilles said. “People were fed up with the party system and looking for something different.”

Today, he’s part of an effort to bring that same kind of something different to Idaho and other parts of the West. Mr. Achilles, an unaffiliated candidate for U.S. Senate, is among a wave of independent challengers to entrenched Republican incumbents or heirs apparent in red states.

In Idaho, where unaffiliated voters outnumber Democrats 2 to 1, Mr. Achilles is the more prominent and moneyed of two independents challenging the incumbent, Jim Risch. Independents also are running for Idaho governor, both of the state’s U.S. House seats and 12 state legislative seats.

Next door in Montana, another independent, Seth Bodnar, is running for the Senate as an independent, as is Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Brian Bengs in South Dakota. Another, Bill Hill, is running for Alaska’s lone House seat. All those candidacies say a lot about the state of the Democratic Party west of the Mississippi, excluding what’s known, affectionately or not, as “the left coast” — California, Oregon and Washington.

Todd Achilles

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Claremont McKenna College alum Todd Achilles is running for the Senate.

Sarah Cutler at The Idaho Statesman:

 Todd Achilles is no longer an Idaho state legislator, and he’s no longer a Democrat. Instead, he’s an independent, now challenging a longtime Idaho Republican senator for his seat in Congress.. Achilles, 58, weighed the decision to run against U.S. Sen. Jim Risch for a long time, spurred by frustration with the state of the economy and the dysfunction of the two-party system, he told the Idaho Statesman.

Idaho’s Republican congressional delegates, including Risch, in recent months have faced public outcry over some of President Donald Trump’s policies, including proposals backed by Trump to sell public lands in Idaho for development. Risch has called on lawmakers to reject the proposal — though in April, he voted to reject a budget amendment that would have banned the government from reducing the federal deficit using proceeds from the sale of public lands. “Everybody’s frustrated by the debt, deficits and dysfunction in Washington, DC,” he said. “Too many people are struggling. Their wages are low. They’re having to get health care from Medicaid programs. The whole system is broken.”

Swing 2022

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Nate Cohn at NYT:

For all the talk about turnout, this is what distinguished the 2022 midterms from any other in recent memory. Looking back over 15 years, the party out of power has typically won independent voters by an average margin of 14 points, as a crucial segment of voters either has soured on the president or has acted as a check against the excesses of the party in power.

This did not happen in 2022. Every major study — the exit polls, the AP/VoteCast study, the Pew study published this week — showed Democrats narrowly won self-identified independent voters, despite an unfavorable national political environment and an older, whiter group of independent voters. A post-election analysis of Times/Siena surveys adjusted to match the final vote count and the validated electorate show the same thing. It took the Democratic resilience among swing voters together with the Democratic resilience in turnout, especially in the Northern battlegrounds, to nearly allow Democrats to hold the U.S. House.

In many crucial states, Democratic candidates for Senate and governor often outright excelled among swing voters, plainly winning over a sliver of voters who probably backed Mr. Trump for president in 2020 and certainly supported Republican candidates for U.S. House in 2022. This was most pronounced in the states where Republicans nominated stop-the-steal candidates or where the abortion issue was prominent, like Michigan.

NH Independents Endorse Biden

In Defying the Odds, we discuss primaries.

John DiStaso at WMUR:

Former Republican U.S. Sen. Gordon Humphrey and former New Hampshire First Lady Dorothy Peterson are among 100 independent Granite State voters announcing their support for former Vice President Joe Biden on Monday.

The Biden campaign said 93 of the 100 “New Hampshire Independents for Biden” are making their support for the former vice president known for the first time. The other seven have been previously announced and are reaffirming their support as members of the grassroots coalition.

The campaign said it intends to make a broad, concerted effort to speak to independent voters over the next six weeks leading to the first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 11.

View the full list of “New Hampshire Independents for Biden” here.

Independents, formally known as undeclared voters, make up the largest voting bloc in the state. As of Oct. 30, they comprised 42 percent of the registered voters in the state, while Republicans were 29.5 percent and Democrats were 28 percent of New Hampshire voters.

Independents can take either a Democratic or a Republican ballot in primary elections and then are able to return to undeclared status if they wish.

In 2016, Sanders got 70 percent of the independent vote in the New Hampshire primary. 

Trump and Independents

At RealClearPolitics, David Brady and Brett Parker note that Trump never had Dems, retains slightly-weakening support among Reps, and is losing independents.

Independents, on the other hand, have moved from a net positive number in January to a steadily increasing net negative approval rating. In June, the gap against Trump was in double digits and by early August it was over 20 points: 30 percent approve and 51 percent disapprove in the latest YouGov poll. It is not surprising that a polarizing figure like Trump draws the ire of Democrats and the support of his party; his present problem is that he has lost support among the Independents who ultimately gave him the presidency.
..,
The overall story for the first seven months of the Trump era is that the president has maintained his co-partisans’ approval, never had the Democrats’ approval, and has lost some support among Independents. Carefully monitoring future developments among Independents is critical – as long as there are fewer Republicans than Democrats in this country, Independents will remain absolutely essential to Republican electoral success. At the moment, they are less supportive of Trump than they were in January -- and may be poised to become even less supportive if the nation’s economic fortunes take a hit.

Independents and the New Hampshire Primary

In The Perfect Tie, the third book in this series, James Ceaser and Andrew Busch explain that the 2000 New Hampshire primary involved an "invisible primary" between John McCain and Bill Bradley.  They were running in different parties but competing for the large bloc of independent voters.  McCain won, enabling him to beat George W. Bush.  Bradley lost, meaning that the primary went to Gore.

James Pindell writes at The Boston Globe:

Unlike in many other states, New Hampshire voters who don’t register as Republican or Democrat can participate in either party’s primary. Republican officials are predicting that these “undeclared” voters — as many as 90,000 of the 250,000 Republican primary voters next year, according to one campaign’s count — will be inclined to pull a ballot for the GOP in the first-in-the-nation primary in large part because that contest is much more heated.

“There is no doubt that independent voters will decide this primary,” said Sarah Crawford Stewart, who ran former Utah governor Jon Huntsman’s independent-focused 2012 Republican campaign here. “And now is the time when every campaign begins looking for the unicorn: the truly independent voters that you know are there, but you have no idea where to find them.”

...
A Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll this week suggested that undeclared voters would make up 32 percent of the Republican primary electorate. Their preferences were largely the same as likely Republican voters as a whole.

New York businessman Donald Trump and Governor John Kasich of Ohio topped the list for undeclared voters with 19 percent and 14 percent, respectively. Senator Marco Rubio had the support of 12 percent of undeclared voters and Senator Ted Cruz received the support of 11 percent of the undeclared voters who were polled.

Indeed, undeclared voters could have the most impact in selecting among the more establishment-oriented candidates — like Bush, Kasich, Rubio, or Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey. These candidates are investing time and money in identifying independent voters.

Primary Turnout in California

PPIC reports:

In the first test of California’s top-two primary in 2012, the new system failed to produce the increase in voter turnout that many had hoped for. But it did appear to encourage participation of independent voters. Under the new system independents are no longer required to take the extra step of requesting a ballot with all legislative and congressional contests on it. As a result, more independents appear to have voted in these primary races than they had under the old system.

These are among the key findings of a report released today by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC).

One of the goals of the top-two primary is to get more voters to the polls, but turnout in the 2012 California primary was the lowest of any presidential primary in 90 years. This was at least partly because the races for president and U.S. Senate were low key. But the result raised questions about turnout in primaries generally and about the impact of the new top-two system, in which voters can vote for any candidate from any party and the two top vote-getters—regardless of party—compete in the general election.

"Reform efforts to increase turnout may not prove particularly effective, but the top-two primary does appear to have already encouraged more independents to vote in legislative and congressional contests,” said Eric McGhee, PPIC research fellow and author of the report.

The shift to the top two has added new urgency to the question of who votes in the primary and who doesn’t. The PPIC report finds that California’s primary electorate is older, less likely to be Latino or Asian American, and typically more Republican than the electorate in the general election. The partisan differences mattered little in the old system because every party that ran at least one candidate in the primary would be assured a place on the fall ballot.

Now, primary voters can close off the possibility of a contest between parties in the fall. There has already been one primary race for a competitive seat that resulted in a same-party contest in November—the 31st congressional district in San Bernardino County. The PPIC analysis shows that the outcome almost certainly would have been different if the fall electorate had voted in the primary.

The report identifies an important reason why turnout will be especially low this year:

The effect of initiative campaigns deserves close consideration because of a recent policy change. The California Legislature, through SB 202 in 2011, offered a new interpretation of the state constitution and declared that all citizen initiatives must appear on the general election ballot. As a result, the June 2014 primary will be the first in decades that does not include a statewide citizen initiative. However, the June ballot will not be devoid of all ballot measures: The legislature has placed two of its own proposals on the ballot, and it is possible that these two will be enough to draw voters to the polls. However, our analysis suggests that should future primary elections fail to include any initiatives on the ballot, primary turnout is likely to be between three and seven percentage points lower than it might otherwise be.

Here are some other reasons why turnout will sag:

• There are no US Senate elections in California this year.
• In the gubernatorial race, Governor Brown has a big lead and is not yet campaigning.  The Republican contenders have raised little money and are unknown to many voters.
• Scandals have dampened political enthusiasm among Californians.

Independents in Swing States

From a new report by Third Way:

Obama and Independents

Resurgent Republic reports on focus-group research:

As part of our Target Voter Series, Resurgent Republic sponsored four focus groups among Independent voters in Denver, Colorado and Richmond, Virginia. These respondents all voted for President Obama in 2008, but are undecided on the generic presidential ballot today.

Conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, the focus groups were split by gender.
In 2008 President Obama won a majority of the national vote due to his strong performance among Independents (52 to 44 percent), and as a result, he began his presidency with a deep reservoir of goodwill among swing voters. Due to Obama’s fiscal policies, it didn’t take long for his support among this target demographic to fray, as shown in our inaugural April 2009 national survey. A rebellion of the center erupted in 2010 as Democrats lost control of the House and were defeated in several battleground gubernatorial races. Ever since that point, President Obama has sought to win back swing voters, a task that will undoubtedly continue to Election Day.

After three-and-a-half years of his presidency, these Obama Independents still like the President, even if they moderately disapprove of the job he is doing. Yet the President’s personal likeability does not prevent many of these Independents from concluding (1) Obama has not delivered according to their expectations and (2) things are not getting better when considering the overall trend line from 2009 to today. The battle for swing voters will evolve once a Republican nominee emerges, but President Obama remains in a precarious position with these voters when their attention is focused on his record.

Additional key findings include:

• It’s premature for politicians to take credit for any positive economic news since these voters believe the economy is improving too slowly or not at all.

• The Independents in all four groups disapprove of both parties in Congress in clear, unmistakable terms.

• There’s growing frustration due to the perceived abuse of government benefits, including unemployment compensation and welfare assistance.

• Both Keystone and Solyndra are liabilities for Obama but for different reasons. The President's actions on the Keystone pipeline contradict an "all of the above" energy policy, and Solyndra puts Obama in the context of "just another politician."

Also see the infographic on Obama-as-car.

Third Way reports:

Who will be this year’s decisive group? Swing Independents.

Third Way’s newest poll with Global Strategy Group looks at 1,000 Independents in battleground states and identifies a bloc of voters who are truly up-for-grabs in 2012: Swing Independents.

There’s good news for the President: Swing Independents have positive views of Obama, but they are not locked down. So far Swing Indys prefer President Obama by 6 points, but over one-third are undecided. The Congressional ballot is virtually tied, with nearly 6 in 10 undecided.

We find that Swing Independents are “opportunity” voters—preferring an optimistic, opportunity framework on the economy over one based on fairness. Why? Opportunity addresses their anxieties about the future, concerns that America is slipping, doubts about how the next generation will succeed, and questions over how we will strengthen our economy.

American Crossroads to Campaign Against Obama

The New York Times reports that American Crossroads is about to launch a major ad attack on President Obama.

Steven J. Law, the group’s leader, said the ads would address the challenge of unseating a president who polls show is viewed favorably even though many people disapprove of his handling of the economy. Basically, Mr. Law said, “how to dislodge voters from him.”

...

The Crossroads advertising push — the timing of which has been the subject of avid speculation at the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago — would give the campaign of Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner, the time and cover to map out its national organization, replenish its bank account and put the finishing touches on its own long-discussed advertising plan, which is expected to highlight the economic pain of ordinary Americans.
... 

“There’s a sense of anxiety out there that’s tremendous,” Mr. Stevens said. “It’s home heating costs, it’s gas prices, the price of food is up. What about people’s everyday lives is easier today than it was four years ago?”

But, Mr. Law said, Crossroads research suggests that Mr. Obama’s campaign has started to gain traction among critical swing voters by arguing that Republicans, including Mr. Romney, favor an “economic plutocracy” in which middle-class voters can no longer count on financial security, even though they work hard and play by the rules.

“His argument is: ‘The reason you feel bad is not because I’ve been an inadequate president but because the rules of the game are stacked against you,’ ” Mr. Law said. Calling it a “dystopian vision,” he added, “that narrative has some gravitational pull.”

But, Mr. Law said, interviews with independent voters, as well as uncommitted Democrats and Republicans who supported Mr. Obama in 2008, have revealed an alternate “emerging view” that Crossroads will seek to solidify, “that Obama just may not be up to the job, he can’t seem to fix things he promised he would fix.”

Third Way reports:

Third Way’s newest poll with Global Strategy Group looks at 1,000 Independents in battleground states and identifies a bloc of voters who are truly up-for-grabs in 2012: Swing Independents.

There’s good news for the President: Swing Independents have positive views of Obama, but they are not locked down. So far Swing Indys prefer President Obama by 6 points, but over one-third are undecided. The Congressional ballot is virtually tied, with nearly 6 in 10 undecided.

We find that Swing Independents are “opportunity” voters—preferring an optimistic, opportunity framework on the economy over one based on fairness. Why? Opportunity addresses their anxieties about the future, concerns that America is slipping, doubts about how the next generation will succeed, and questions over how we will strengthen our economy.

Santorum and Independents

Gallup reports:

The percentage of Americans identifying as political independents increased in 2011, as is common in a non-election year, although the 40% who did so is the highest Gallup has measured, by one percentage point. More Americans continue to identify as Democrats than as Republicans, 31% to 27%.

These data suggest a potential electability problem for Rick Santorum. Looking at exit polls, Aaron Blake writes at The Washington Post:

While Santorum won the 18-to-29-year-old demographic in both his 1994 and 2000 Senate campaigns, he took just 32 percent of them in 2006. The same happened with white Catholics, who supported Santorum twice before giving him just 42 percent of the vote in 2006.

But here’s the key number: While he won independents 57 percent to 43 percent in his 2000 reelection campaign, he lost them 71 percent to 28 percent in 2006 — a pretty stunning 29-point dropoff.

Now, it should be noted here that 2006 was a very bad year for Republicans, which is at least partly why Santorum’s numbers dropped so precipitously. Santorum was also running against Casey, a man whose name is worth a lot in the Keystone State.
In addition, Santorum was left for dead rather early by the national Republican Party, which stopped running ads on his behalf a few weeks before the election because he appeared to be a lost cause (another state where the party pulled out early, Ohio, featured a similar blowout of a GOP incumbent).

But the fact is that Santorum never polled well in that 2006 race. He trailed by double digits as early as mid-2005, when few imagined the Democratic wave that was approaching.

While he came into Congress in a pretty heavily Democratic district and won two Senate races in a nominally blue state — fair points that Santorum raises in his defense — toward the end of his Senate tenure and today, he has become a pretty divisive character.

Greenberg and Carville on the Results

Politico reports:

"The White House had the best and the brightest, but they, what would Bush say, misunderestimated, whatever the word is,” said Democratic consultant James Carville Thursday at a breakfast with reporters held by the Christian Science Monitor.

Pollster Stan Greenberg said Obama downplayed “an almost Depression-like economic crisis,” by inaccurately projecting the magnitude of job losses. “They predicated everything on the jobs coming back from March. They’re still in the middle of this crisis. This is a total misframing of this moment. Some of it’s policy ... a lot of it is giving the people in this crisis a sense of what the scale of it is, and what has to be done to get out of it,” he said.

Carville, who helped mastermind Clinton’s 1992 run for the presidency, said the failure of the White House to tailor a more populist economic message likely cost Democrats at least two dozen House seats

At Democracy Corps, Greenberg and Carville analyze the election and particularly point to independents:

The independents were an immense problem in 2010. Indeed, the Democrats’ support among independents dropped from an 18-point Democratic advantage in 2006, to 8 points in 2008, and turning Republican by a painfully familiar 18 points in 2010. We have to get inde-pendents back to at least even where it had been before 2006. With our current broad base, we can have big elections in that realm, though obviously more is better.

Part of the problem lies in the character of the off-year electorate. The independents were more male, white, and senior than in 2006 and 2008. A presidential electorate will address some of the problem.

But much more important is the proportion of independents who called themselves con-servatives. That was up from 34 to 42 percent. And while some of that may have been due to Tea Party activism and the determination of conservatives to oppose Obama, that process began in the fall of the 2008 election. There has been a conservative reaction against the government’s response to the crisis from the beginning, even before Obama took office. From the outset of Obama’s presidency, there has been a steady rise in the number who call themselves conserva-tive and in the standing of the N.R.A. (but not pro-life groups).

Independents in 2010

Resurgent Republic reports on a joint poll with Democracy Corps:

2010 was a nationalized referendum on President Obama and Democratic control of Congress, not just a series of choices between two candidates. Which party would control Congress was a factor in deciding a Congressional vote for 61 percent of 2010 voters, including 74 percent of Republicans, 57 percent of Democrats, and 51 percent of Independents. Among voters who supported the Republican candidate, 44 percent say their vote was a vote for the particular Republican candidate, 34 percent say it was a vote to provide a check on the agenda of President Obama and Democrats, and 14 percent say it was a vote against the Democrat. A plurality (43 percent) of Independent voters who voted Republican said their vote was driven by a desire to provide a check on President Obama and the Democrats, versus 30 percent who voted for the Republican candidate and 19 percent who voted against the Democratic candidate.

Among voters who supported the Democratic candidate, 43 percent say it was a vote to support the agenda of President Obama and Democrats, 43 percent say it was a vote for the particular Democratic candidate, and 10 percent say it was a vote against the Republican. Among Independents who voted Democrat, 46 percent voted for the Democratic candidate, 31 percent voted to support the agenda of President Obama and the Democrats, and 17 percent voted against the Republican.

CA Primary: Independents' Day?

In California, voters to decline to state a party preference may nevertheless vote in party primaries. Ken McLaughlin of the San Jose Mercury News reports on a possible impact on the GOP races for governor and senator:

Historically, California's independent voters don't swing primary elections. But with Boxer and Jerry Brown, the presumed Democratic candidate for governor, essentially running unopposed in the primary, Republican strategists are preparing for an influx of independent voters since the GOP primary is the only game in town for those who want their vote to make a difference in the top races in June.

The independents could be key in the U.S. Senate race in which Republicans Carly Fiorina and Tom Campbell are running neck and neck in the polls. Additionally, Meg Whitman, the GOP front-runner in the gubernatorial primary, is expected to target independents now to try to lock up their votes through the fall through a direct mail campaign that encourages independents to request a Republican mail-in ballot or pick one up at the polls.