This article is from Feb. 28, 2020, after Jan 6th, hundreds of thousands left the republican party, registration dropped significantly after the capital attack. This article shows a trend that has been ongoing for decades, republicans are shrinking and independents and democrats are growing. The last time I checked there were31% democrats, 41% independents and only 25% republicans, but that was before Jan 6th, any increase after that came at the expense of the republicans. Almost half of so called independents were really soft Trump supporters and that makes many of them persuadable.
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Independents outnumber registered Republicans for the first time - The Washington Post
For the first time, there are fewer registered Republicans than independents
For the first time in history, there are more registered independents in the United States than there are registered Republicans.
It may not be for the reason you think, though.
New data from
Ballot Access News, which tracks registrations in the 31 states that require voters to register by party, shows that independents account for 29.09 percent of voters in them, compared with 28.87 percent for Republicans. As recently as 2004, Republicans outpaced independents by nearly 10 percentage points.
There are still way more registered Democrats; 39.66 percent of voters are registered with that party.
This marks the first time since party registration began in the early 1900s that the number of registered independents in the United States has surpassed members of either major political party, according to Ballot Access News.
Here’s the data going back to 2004:
(Aaron Blake)
But before anybody chalks this up as having to do with the current occupant of the White House, it’s worth parsing the trends.
While independents have surpassed Republicans, there actually hasn’t been a huge drop in GOP party registration since President Trump took office. Since October 2016, GOP registration has dropped by half a percentage point. The number of registered Democrats declined by nearly a full point over the same span. Independents have benefited from both drops.
And they have been doing so for years. Democrats are more than three points off their peak this century, which was in 2008, when Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) was about to become president. At the time, 43.62 percent of voters were registered Democrats.
Republicans are also more than three points off where they were four years earlier, in 2004, when 32.79 percent of voters were Republican and George W. Bush won reelection.
Since 2008, the trendline for each party has been relatively steady. But while Democratic registrations fell more between 2016 and 2018 (0.78 percent) than Republican ones (0.15 percent), Republicans have fallen more since 2018. Since Democrats won back the House in that midterm contest, their registration numbers have declined by just 0.16 percent, compared with 0.37 percent for Republicans.
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