chAPTeR seven • InTeResT GRouPs AnD PolITIcAl PARTIes 167
in presidential election years were split-ticket. A major reason was that many voters, espe-
cially in the South, were pairing a Republican for president with a conservative Democrat
for Congress. In recent years, conservative Democrats have become scarce, and the inci-
dence of split-ticket voting has ranged
only from 17 to 19 percent.
While the number of voters who
identify as independents has never been
greater, many voters who call themselves
independents actually lean toward one
or the other of the two major parties. In
a poll taken in March 2013, for exam-
ple, 48 percent of all voters reported
either that they were Democrats or that
they were independents who leaned
toward the Democratic Party. The corre-
sponding figure for the Republicans was
41 percent. Leaving aside respondents
who were unable to answer the ques-
tion, true independents were less than
10 percent of the polling sample.605040302010
0Percentage of VotersYearDemocratRepublicanIndependent37%
33%
27%19 44 19 48 1952 19 56 1 960 1964 1968 1972 1 976 1980 1984 1988 19 92 1 996 2000 2004 200 820122016fIGuRe 7–3: Party Identification from 1944 to the Present
Sources: Gallup Report, August 1995; New York Times/CBS poll, June 1996; Gallup Report, February 1998;
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, November 2003; Gallup polls, 2004 through 2013.A third of voters self-report being independents. Why might the true
percentage be less? (Jeffrey Coolidge)Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
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