The Southwest Witnesses Surge of Independents

[Frodo]

In Southwest, a Shifting Away From Party Ties

By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: October 24, 2006

SHOW LOW, Ariz. — Political parties are like cowboy boots in many parts of the West. If one pair doesn’t fit, you try on another.

Hal F. Butler is old enough to remember when the boots here in Navajo County were overwhelmingly filled by Republicans, and then, beginning in the late 1940’s, how the county turned Democratic. Mr. Butler became a Democrat in the 1950’s at the urging of his mother, a staunch Republican who said the Democratic Party was the party of the future for an ambitious young man.

Now Mr. Butler, who is 81 with half a century of elected and appointed office behind him, including a stint as Show Low’s mayor, sees an emerging third wave: the age of the independents is here, he said, and his own family is shifting along with it.

“The independent vote is swinging everything,” he said. “They’re going to be the powerhouse.”

Nowhere has the shift been more pronounced in recent years than in the Southwest, where Republicans have enjoyed an overwhelming advantage since the days of Barry Goldwater. Here in Arizona, people who reject the old major party labels are by far the fastest-growing category of voter, with the number of independents doubling over the last 10 years, to more than one in four.

[Alcon]

Western independents may be growing, but there's a solidly conservative "just talk" rural contingent.  The way they describe Show Low, it would sound like a wild swing area, not a place that Bush carried 3-to-1.

[Adlai Stevenson]

But don't Independents tend to lean one way in a state anyway?  In New Jersey in most elections Independents go solidly for the Democratic candidate whereas an Arizonan Independent would do the opposite.