In response to a Globe article on Massachusetts independent voters and the chances of Christy Mihos, .08 Acres has an excellent analysis on indepedent affiliation and voter behavior:
Now, I pointed out last year that Massachusetts was purple in gubernatorial elections, but I’m not sure if the results of those contests prove much about the temperament of Massachusetts independents. While these unenrolled voters may swing to the moderate Republican when voting for governor, they decisively swing toward the Democrat in nearly every other case. Non-gubernatorial statewide positions are all held by Democrats, as is 100% of the seats in Congress and a supermajority of the Legislature. I’m also not sure that this is a function of ideology, either. Republicans must be moderate, or at least fake it, to get elected, Democrats in the State House run the gamut from conservative to ultra-liberal.
…the gubernatorial election seems to be the exception to the Democratic tendencies of unenrolled voters. This may be, as many posit, because people want a check on the Democratic legislature, which they fear will raise their taxes. I’m not convinced, however, that this makes sense since they vote in that same legislature year after year, even though they’re apparently terrified of a tax increase. If I had to ascribe this to one factor, I would say that it was the publicity of the gubernatorial contest more than anything else. People are more likely to vote for the person over the party when they know what that person stands for. They’re more likely to use the party as a cue when they know little about the race. Since the governor’s race is all over the papers and the television, voters are more likely to know the issues and the personalities involved. That’s not true of legislature races, where one has to make a real effort to find any specific positions, or even who the candidates are. It seems to me that it’s in these low-profile races where unenrolled voters show their partisan preferences, since it shows how they would vote if the only difference they’re aware of between the candidates is the party.
I’d agree, though I might add a corollary. Part of the differential is the dynamic sco describes: nongubernatorial races are less publicized, so voters use partisan identification as a guide. The flipside, meanwhile, is that voters wouldn’t be equally interested in all races even if the news coverage or ad levels were the same (and coverage is not the same because people aren’t interested). Gubernatorial races have a special function as elections of broad acclamation, not of specific votes and legislative spoils. That is, people who aren’t interested in politics enough (or versed in it enough) to follow State Senate races feel like they have a stake in voting for governor (or US president). We can conceive of different subsets of voters, some responding to policy specifics or bread-and-butter concerns that drive the district legislative races and some responding mostly to broad symbolic and ideological debates of the gubernatorial race.
The vaunted independent voter includes the latter subset. I don’t have hard data proving the existence of this group of voter, but one key may lie in the difference between the nonvotes for 2002 State Senate races (20%) and those for the 2002 governor’s race (1.2%). Call it a protest vote at uncontested or undercontested races, but I think it does suggest that a substantial portion of the electorate is variable in its behavior: engaged in choosing the governor, unengaged in choosing the state legislature.
Add on top of this the paradox that comes with a representative system: voters might recognize that within a given level of government expenditure, it makes sense for their representative to push for spending that benefits their municipality - however the net effect of every representative fighting for spending may be that the aggregate spending goes up. So you may have another subset of voters happy with the bread-and-butter efforts of their state rep or senator, but still wanting to make a vote of acclamation for a governor of the opposite party.
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