A quick story here. In responding to another post this morning I wanted to add some data about how last year at this time in the 39 states which require voter registration the number of Independents had exceeded the number of Republicans. However, getting another data point, as is my usual soapbox for anyone who’s come across various comments of mine, I find that Gallup Polling is now showing as of this month, perhaps for the first time since the 1940’s, that Independents may now be half of all voters!
Doubtlessly this month the 5% jump in self-reported unaffiliated voters is bleeding off from the Republican party. But my point has been that we’ve been bleeding voters as well for about a dozen years now and that as a party we ignore that. And that our margins have been thin against Republicans since Carter and Reagan as compared to the decades before after we abandoned labor as the foundation we based our party on and Keynesian demand based economics. I occasionally also show a Pew Research graph below that goes to 2014 which shows the trends of the Democratic party going back to our golden era in the middle of the last century.
Making my case that becoming a New Deal and Great Society party again, putting workers and social justice ahead of industry and finance, is likely a self-fulfilling mechanism if we want to a chance to make liberalism the dominant political and cultural norm again. And accomplishing all our goals without obstruction. I argue also that in that time when we ourselves were a party of 50% of the country that we had grown increasingly more liberal as each decade proceeded. Not only in policy positions but consider that in the 1930’s when FDR first came intro office we were still the party of Jim Crow. And yet by the end of the 1960’s, (where I see the Vietnam war as the catalyst that ended our glory years), we had instituted desegregation and ultimately the Civil Rights act and Voting Rights act and a number of Education rights act policies. Including everything from Social Security to Medicare.
And also perhaps once again we might, as is often the case in American history, place the Republican party and conservatism once again into a semi-permanent minority status for as long as a couple of generations or more. Out of power for another 50-ish years.
But with so many voters trending away from both major parties we have got to admit that we are also letting voters slip away from the major party structures.
I’ll include another chart which shows our current status as of a little over a couple of years ago, along with the somewhat larger number of liberal Independents than conservatives completing what edge we have against the GQP.
We must start primarily looking leftwards for allies and start reclaiming those numbers. We must build a bridge between ourselves and Independents. And I think that a full fledged return to mid 20th century hard liberal principals, along with lessons learned, a greening of the next New Deal, single payer healthcare and a return to antitrust making the middle class dominant over the wealthy and industry is the only way we get there. And eventually, I believe, if we do that conservatives on the right will eventually start giving up their scam of an ideology and start embracing liberalism, moving leftwards as a way forward.
And we might have more breathing space to do that for the next couple of years while the Republican party is at least in a temporary fracturing of factions. But we have one hell of a lot of work to do. 50% unaffiliation shows that we are not suiting the needs of half of the people who even bother to vote.