For more than 35 million registered U.S. voters, there is neither a donkey nor an elephant in the room. They are the third-party or “unaffiliated” voters, who either support a different party or are too fed up with politics as usual to join the Democratic or Republican parties.
These voters hold significant power to swing elections. They’re the wild card in a world that prefers predictable electoral conditions, with endless studies and polls.
When registering to vote, some states require voters to declare a party affiliation. These data create a snapshot of which party is more powerful in a state and can help inform strategy for candidates.
For example, based on voter registration numbers, South Dakota is a heavily red state where it’s tough for Democrat or third-party candidates to win elections. As of Sept. 1, South Dakota had 150,748 registered Democrats and 304,114 registered Republicans—a GOP advantage of 153,366.
South Dakota has an additional 151,353 third-party and unaffiliated registered voters. Assuming a 100 percent voter turnout, even if every voter in this third group voted with Democrats, the result would be 302,101 for a Democratic candidate, which isn’t quite enough to beat all 304,114 Republican voters.
But that’s not how the real world works. Republican and Democratic voters are fairly predictable, but they don’t always vote with their own party and they don’t always turn out to vote.
Voters in the third category are much less predictable, yet sometimes candidates ignore them.
Predictable Voters
Candidates with limited time and money can’t talk to every voter on every issue, so they make choices about which voters to invest their resources in, according to Jong Eun Lee, assistant professor of political science at North Greenville University in South Carolina.“You have to target people you think are most likely to vote, and most likely to vote for you,” Mr. Lee told The Epoch Times.
“So if I’m Republican, I’m more likely to knock on the door of the people I know are Republican, because these are the people I can get to vote, and it’s going to make my time and commitment worthwhile.”
Energizing the base to show up on Election Day is a strategy used by candidates of a majority party, while a minority party candidate must work to convince likely voters in their party as well as unaffiliated or third-party voters, Mr. Lee said.That strategy could make the difference in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, where these voters have considerable sway.
Pennsylvania has slightly more registered Democrats (3,886,501) over Republicans (3,437,073), according to September voter registration records. The difference is 449,428 votes.
However, there are 1.2 million third-party or unaffiliated voters.
“This is an ideologically diverse group of voters, including discontented Republicans and Democrats, moderates, hardcore progressives, and hardcore conservatives,” Mr. Lee said. “Virtually anyone who doesn’t affiliate with the two major parties.”
Candidates try to identify whether someone is a conservative-leaning independent, or progressive-leaning independent, Mr. Lee said. If candidates are able to identify a voter’s ideological leaning, it is easier to decide whom to target for campaigning.
“Some campaigns engage in community-based outreach. Perhaps there is a particular community that normally does not vote in higher numbers but now has a certain local policy issue the community is interested in,” he said. “This could be an opportunity for the campaigns to reach out to independent voters through issue awareness campaigns. Another way is through checking the voter’s consumer practices.”
Ballot Access
It can’t be assumed that the unaffiliated voter will end up voting for a Democratic or Republican candidate.“There’s no reason that they should be compelled to vote a certain way in an election, where they fundamentally have the abstract, strong ideological differences with the two major parties and their two candidates,“ Angela McArdle, chair of the national Libertarian Party, told The Epoch Times. ”There should be more options if we want to be a moral and just society.”
Nationally, a third-party presidential candidate typically draws more than a million votes, and Ms. McArdle said a third-party option is becoming a possibility in the current presidential election cycle.
“You’ve got Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expressing interest in running as third-party independent. That’s going to be a total game changer,“ she said. ”You’ve seen this movement called ‘No Labels’ with Holly Paige pushing for a centrist-type third party. You’ve got the Forward Party, which came out of a recent split within the Democratic Party. There’s a lot of appetite and interest—there is momentum.”
New parties are learning what the Libertarian Party already knows: access to the ballot is incredibly challenging.
“It’s something that people in positions of power use to hold on to those positions of power,” Ms. McArdle said. “There are all kinds of laws set up at the state level—and it differs state by state—that makes it very challenging for you to get on the ballot if you’re not declared as a Republican or a Democrat.
Sometimes Ignored
Republicans and Democrats don’t have a general practice of trying to reach people who are unaffiliated, Ms. McArdle said.“I think that with races being very close—and I think George Bush Jr. did this really aggressively—you see people playing really hard to their own base, making sure that their own base is energized, that people have updated their voter registration, and that they’re very active, and they have individual voters doing a lot of grassroots work and outreach on social media,” she said.
“The primary objective behind that is not even to expand their base into the unregistered voter base. It is to ensure that their own people feel bought-in, they have skin in the game, and they show up to vote on Election Day.”
Independent and third-party registered voters are unpredictable and unreliable, Ms. McArdle said; that’s on par with people who aren’t registered to vote. Though an unprecedented number of those voters turned out at the polls in 2020, Ms. McArdle views that as a political anomaly rather than the new norm.
“They were highly motivated to vote against Donald Trump. I think that the Democratic Party did a really good job of freaking people out over Donald Trump 2.0, and they got a ton of people to show up to the polls.” Ms. McArdle said. “I don’t think they’re going to get that this next election cycle. I don’t think Biden’s second term is anywhere close to something people want to get behind if they’re on the fence about it. It’s just not going to work the same way this year.”
Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party is working with other groups to build a third-party base.
“We are expanding our reach to other independents and third parties who are people who, if you’re already voting third party, if you’re already interested and you’ve decided you’re not committed to Republicans and Democrats, you are much more likely to vote for a Libertarian candidate than someone who is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. It’s a much easier sell to someone who’s already opted out of the two-party system,” Ms. McArdle said.
Conservative Theory
When registering to vote, some people wish to conceal their affiliation by not declaring a party, or by registering as independent.“We’re getting more tribal in nature, on both the left and the right,” Kaelan Dorr, a former aide to former President Donald Trump and current chief marketing officer for the free speech browser TUSK, told The Epoch Times.
“This is a really nasty game. Politics has become increasingly nasty and polarized over the last 10 years, and I think it’s far worse than people 12 years ago, 15 years ago, thought it would ever be.”
He thinks that nonaffiliated voters tend to lean to the right.
“I’m of the belief that far more people believe in conservative values, but don’t necessarily vote Republican because of the way that they’ve grown up or what their parents have told them,“ he said. ”These [independents] are the people that propelled Trump to victory in 2016 and very far in 2020.
“This is that silent majority that we are always trying to capture empirically—the folks that don’t like the influence that Hollywood has on, like, the way we raise our kids, or maybe they don’t like TikTok. They don’t like the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. They don’t like fighting endless foreign wars on foreign soil.”
They don’t know that they are conservative yet, Mr. Dorr said. And he suspects that is why some people don’t declare a party.
“Society tells you that being conservative isn’t cool. Society tells you that being a conservative or a Republican makes you a racist, a Nazi, or a bigot,” he said.
It’s the same reason, he says, that some voters are hesitant to tell pollsters which candidate they support. Millions of third-party and unaffiliated voters will remain unpredictable until they make their voices heard on Election Day.
States by the Numbers
Nationwide, there were 48 million registered Democratic voters, 36.4 million registered Republican voters, and 35.3 million registered voters who identified themselves as independent or unaffiliated with any political party as of October 2022.
Thirty-one states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands allow, but don’t require, voters to declare their party affiliation when registering to vote.In some states, this is an important distinction, because only voters registered with the Republican or Democratic parties are allowed to vote in primaries. For example, in Pennsylvania, independents and unaffiliated voters must sit out the primary. Democrats can only vote for their preferred Democratic candidates and Republicans get a Republican-only primary ballot.
In states that allow voters to declare other party affiliations, the third category is often the most populous.
In Massachusetts, there are more registered third-party and unaffiliated voters (2,973,673) than Democrats (1,386,550) and Republicans (421,333) combined, according to the most recent state data.
North Carolina has more registered “other” voters (2,714,305) than registered Democrats (2,414,115) or registered Republicans (2,208,590).In Alaska, there are 600,130 total registered voters, including 382,879 other voters, 142,328 Republicans, and 74,923 Democrats, as of August 2023.
The state of Wyoming has 216,617 registered voters, of which there are 177,154 registered Republicans, 23,030 registered Democrats, and 16,433 third-party or unaffiliated voters.
The District of Columbia has 513,947 total registered voters with 406,833 of them declared as Democrats, 28,413 as Republicans, and 96,701 as third-party or unaffiliated voters.
