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Independent voters can be decisive in elections – but they're pretty unpredictable, not 'shadow partisans'

Thom Reilly, Professor & Co-Director, Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy, School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, The Conversation on

Published in Political News

In the end there was no red wave. And there was no blue wave.

There was an independent wave.

Pollsters and pundits were counting on independent voters in the 2022 midterm elections to swing to the Republicans as they did in 2014 when Barack Obama was president. That’s when independent turnout in the midterms added up to 29% of all voters, and the GOP won an additional 13 seats in Congress.

Expectations for the 2022 midterm elections also were based on a similar pattern in the 2018 midterms, when Donald Trump was president. Independents then represented 30% of the voters, and they broke for Democrats 54% to 42%.

Almost the mirror image. But mirrors don’t always reflect reality.

Ongoing surveys by the Gallup organization show that self-identified independents have averaged 42% of the U.S. public over the past year. Their influence was felt in the 2022 midterms.

 

Nationally, these nonaligned voters were 31% of voters in the 2022 midterm. Despite the fact that the sitting president was a Democrat, they broke for Democrats by 2 percentage points, according to Edison Research Survey. They voted for Democrats by far bigger margins in key states with competitive Senate races – by 20 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 11 percentage points in Georgia and 16 percentage points in Arizona, where independents were fully 40% of those who voted.

Independent voters in the 2022 midterms made a decisive difference in close elections.

This came as a surprise to many pollsters and pundits who had predicted that independents would break for the GOP. They chalked up the pro-Democratic leanings of these unaligned voters to independents’ distrust of Republicans’ eclipsing their anxiety and distrust about inflation and the economy.

Maybe so. But as someone who studies independent voters in the U.S., I believe pollsters got it wrong because so little is known about the voting patterns of independent voters.

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