Swing voters decide elections

We hear it every day: America is divided into two camps, red and blue, and the key to elections is just energizing the base.

But in fact, while the base is critical, it's not the whole picture. Behind all the rhetoric, the reality is that swing is still king. The two or three or 10 voters who are the quietest in focus groups, who never demonstrate and who belong to no political party, will be the ones who determine the political course of America.

This is less true in Washington, where everyone has to choose sides to survive, but outside the Beltway, trends show that voters are increasingly open and flexible, not rigid. They are looking at candidates' records and visions, not their party affiliation.

In the past 50 years, independents have grown from one-quarter to one-third of the electorate, according to Gallup polls. In California, the number of independent voters more than doubled between 1991 and 2005. The fastest-growing political party in the United States is no party.

According to the American National Election Studies at the University of Michigan, the number of split-ticket voters in the electorate — meaning people who vote for a Democrat for president and a Republican for Congress, or vice versa — has gone up 42 percent since 1952. That shows a radical new willingness on the part of Americans to look at individual candidates, not party slates. It is a sign of a thinking electorate, not a partisan one.

When asked, Americans have a characteristic swagger and express that they definitely will or will not vote for candidates and parties. In 1995, 65 percent of voters said they would never vote for Bill Clinton. One year later they re-elected him in a landslide.

Recent polls show that rather than a static electorate, we have a dynamically changing one. Based on the polls six months ago, journalists were declaring Republican hegemony. Today, Democrats have the widest margin in two decades on the generic congressional vote.

Was there a sudden surge in the number of hard-core Democrats answering surveys, or was it just a matter of America's swing voters deciding that President Bush is failing on the economy, the war and, recently, national security, by compromising the ports? Clearly, there is a massive swing electorate out there that is receiving more information from more sources than ever before — and acting on it.