October 05, 2012 06:15 PM UTC

Unaffiliated voter registration surges everywhere. Why and what ramifications will this have ?

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• by: allyncooper

(added a break in the middle for promotion. Interesting… – promoted by ProgressiveCowgirl)

I did a comment last month on the phenomenon of the recent surge of unaffliated registered voters based on some revealing numbers in Larimer County which I published in the comment posts since the numbers were quite a shocker to me. Re-published here.

Larimer County voter registration growth Dec. 6, 2011 to Sept. 5, 2012.

Unaffiliated: 6,816

Republican: 2,291

Democrat: 1,995

Other: 592

Larimer County voter registration growth Aug. 1, 2012 to Sept. 5, 2012

Unaffiliated: 2,307

Democrat: 997

Republican: 502

Other: 175

Those numbers are quite a wake up call – there are more new unaffiliated voter registrations than Democratic, Republican, and other (“third” parties) combined, and by a huge margin.  

A couple of days ago I read a national Yahoo story about this phenomenon, it’s occurring everywhere. I also searched on the subject and found numerous stories from local and state sources verifying this is happening in almost all parts of the country.

There has been a long term trend in unaffiliated voters to be sure, but the data clearly indicates this has accelerated dramatically in the last two years and the upswing gets even more pronounced  this voter registration cycle.

The reasons for this trend are not clear, but this is definitely something the established parties are going to have to deal with and adapt to, since an increasingly  greater appeal will have to be made to unaffiliated voters than the base of the party. I believe I detected this in Romney’s performance in the debate Wednesday evening with some of his talking points geared more to what would appeal to unaffiliated voters at the expense of his Republican base.

So three questions:

1. Why is the unaffiliated surge happening?

2. What ramifications is this going to have long term on the political landscape?

3. And of immediate interest, what effect, if any, do you think this will have on the November elections?