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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

You Aren’t Actually An Independent

Shankar Vedantam says lots of people like to believe they are politically independent, but it’s not true, according to research. Most people who identify as “independent” will tend to pretty uniformly favor one party over the other. Researchers have developed a test to suss out which party that is among self-identified independents. Take it here.  […]

Shankar Vedantam says lots of people like to believe they are politically independent, but it’s not true, according to research. Most people who identify as “independent” will tend to pretty uniformly favor one party over the other. Researchers have developed a test to suss out which party that is among self-identified independents. Take it here. 

I registered to vote as an Independent, but there’s no doubt in my mind that I generically favor Republicans. I generally dissent from the foreign policy of the GOP, and generally dissent from its economic views, but in the end, I am more likely to vote for a generic Republican than for a generic Democratic, because social and cultural issues are the most important ones to me — and on these, the Democratic Party is alien territory. And yet, I don’t wish to be a Republican, not because I fear partisanship cooties, but because I genuinely dislike the Republican Party (and the Democratic Party, for what it’s worth).

An independent conservative, then? But how independent is one when he or she can be counted on to vote regularly for one side over the other? Is “independence” a distinction without a difference?

Let me ask the room: If you consider yourself a political independent, when is the last time you voted for someone who is of the party you usually don’t support? Why did you do it?

 

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