There is a certain cache to being registered as independent these days, so it doesn't surprise me that more people are doing it. Whether people shift their actual votes with their party allegiances is the really question.
I consider myself independent because I don't care, at all, about the health, power, success, or control of either political party. As entities, they mean nothing to me. I can't fathom voting a straight ticket. I hate the two-party system intensely, and feel that it, more than any other factor, is responsible for the abject failure of our system of government. We need more political parties to offer more philosophical options to voters, and the only way to achieve that is to institute sincere campaign finance reform, so that a candidate isn't required to seek the financial sponsorship of one party or the other to compete in a election. I'm tired of candidates being forced, fiscally, into one of only two extreme molds, in order to be able to run for a serious office. The Roberts court seems determined to make this problem even more extreme, with their campaign finance stupidity in the wrongly decided Citizens United case. Unfortunately, we're headed in the wrong direction.
That's why stupidity like the credit downgrade happens. Zealots like the Tea Party House can act in direct opposition to our national best interest, secure in the knowledge that right-leaning voters have no choice but to tacitly support their brand of hard right intransigence. Those voters have nowhere else to go but to the opposite extreme, and that's not going to happen. It's absurd and sickening that our system chokes away the possibility of moderate parties, in between the poles, that could the extremist wackos in check. But the money gap is just too significant at present to allow a third party to get off the ground. That how our two-party system is designed to work -- corporate money controls the level of variation possible by limiting the field to only two candidates, from the two parties it already controls, while using the high levels of said money to choke off the possibility of an outsider disturbing any core corporate-friendly principles. This control of the spectrum keeps all the core issues essentially untouched and unaltered 95% of the time (Obama's attack of the insurance industry was a notable exception -- and look at the forces brought to bear to kill reform in that case. Look what it took to get anything to change.). We have a sham democracy controlled by special interest money, which controls both parties. Given that, why would anyone feel any real attachment to either party? It's like liking someone's left hand, but hating their right hand. How to you miss that those limbs are connected and the same?
When I choose a candidate, I care about my opinions, not any party ideology, so I vote for whichever candidate most closely aligns with me. In my mind, the entire field is auditioning for me, and not the other way around, so the idea of rooting for one side over the other is nonsensical. Though I am unabashedly a liberal political thinker, I find that I vote for republicans 10-25% of the time in any given election, mostly locally, and don't really care which party wins an election if the candidate is doing what I want. Admittedly, that percentage has dropped lately, due to the complete lack of moderate republican candidates operating at the national or state level these days. On the national stage, it's becoming harder and harder to find republicans that are rational, reasonable, able to compromise, and don't view politics as some sort of crusade. Until the pendulum swings back, I'm really left with little choice but to vote for Democrats, who aren't perfect but seem far more cable of actually running a sane government at this point in time. But that doesn't mean I like them. My choices have been unfairly curtailed by a system design to limit actual change.
