Measuring party support: Leaners are not independents

Many Americans, especially middle class and better educated ones, call themselves independent and citizens who choose the better candidate regardless of party affiliation. Their numbers seem to have increased in recent decades to nearly 40% of the electorate. The description and estimate are misleading. Very few Americans lack a party preference. Our largely unchanged high levels of party voting and the willingness of most “independents” to acknowledge a party preference after a bit of probing indicates that independence is more a matter of self-presentation than an accurate statement about our approach to elections, candidates, the parties, and politics in general. Most of the independents in national surveys and most of the increase in their numbers are contributed by “leaners” (those who initially describe themselves as independents but then acknowledge a preference for either the Democrats or Republicans). Leaners are partisans. Characterizing them as independents underestimates the partisanship of Americans and leads to inaccurate estimates of party effects and the responsiveness of the electorate to short-term electoral forces. The frequent treatment of leaners as independents in The American Voter Revisited contributes to this all-too-common misconception.The data used in this analysis were provided by the Interuniversity Consortium for Social and Political Research. Neither the Consortium nor the principle investigators of the various national election studies used here are responsible for the analysis or interpretation.