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sco of .08 Acres has another post up on Massachusetts independent voters. Those who aren’t already reading his blog should go read his thoughts on the topic. In short, his argument goes like this:

1. A new Gallup poll on voters’ party identification gives a good indication of how Bay Staters are identifying, including independent voters, who are asked which way they lean.
2. In Massachusetts, Democrats have numerical superiority and there are roughly equal numbers of independents leaning Democrat as Republican
3. Since there’s an equal statistical chance of independents going, "While it is necessary to appeal to independent minded voters, if half of them are already in-tune with Democratic positions, then it seems to me that this will naturally happen in the course of shoring up Democratic support. Put another way, if you can manage to unify the Democrats (no small feat, even — maybe especially — in Massachusetts) then enough unenrolled voters will be swept up in the current to put you over the 50% needed to win an election."

In the background is (as I read it) sco’s attempt to challenge with empirical data the conventional wisdom that independents are inclined to put a "break" on a Democratic legislature by voting for a Republican governor. It’s a conventional wisdom that I tend to hold to, but am willing to see debunked.

However, I see a problem with following the Gallup study to sco’s conclusions. First, as clarification, it’s not true that "half of independent voters" lean Democratic. 9 percent of the electorate doesn’t lean one way or the other, according to the survey, so the percentage of independents leaning Democratic is closer to 40 percent (of independents).

More importantly, how voters self-identify is not a historically useful guide to how they’ve voted in gubernatorial elections. Romney/Healey got 49.4 percent of the vote, Howell 1 percent. If the Republicans + GOP-leaning independents category consists of 34.1 percent of voters, that’s still a 16.3% portion of the electorate who’s in the Unenrolled or Democrats + Dem-leaning independents category who voted for Romney. That’s a lot. (Caveat: we’re talking merely proportions of electorate here, so the comparison to actual voters is a bit apples-to-oranges. Dem voters might have refrained from voting for a lackluster candidate and stayed home, but it really would have to be shown that they did so in high enough numbers to completely invalidate the analysis here.)

In short, just because independent voters are statistically equally likely to be Dem-leaning as GOP-leaning doesn’t get us any closer to answering the question on everyone’s mind: why do so many voters election after election choose Republican governors even as Democrats win elections in every other arena? sco thinks it’s Democrat disunity that drives the independents to right each time; he may be right. I think the conventional wisdom (voters want divided government as fiscal break on legislature) still has explanatory power. In either case, the Gallup numbers on party identification just don’t say under what conditions independent voters are breaking one way or the other, or the reasons for their votes.

Finally, just as a practical matter, what do we mean by Democratic unity? As I wrote last year,

Furthermore, let’s remember that while tens of thousand left-liberal voters defected to the arms of the Greens in 2002 (out of a million left-of-center voters), the progressive politicians themselves did not. All of the candidates defeated in the primary - Reich, Birmingham and Tollman - stood together on stage with O’Brien and pledged unity against Romney. To my knowledge, none of the major progressives in the Legislature - folks like Barrios or Rushing - endorsed Stein.

Is this condition of unity (primary candidates actively supporting the primary winner, legislators actively supporting the party candidate) sufficient in 2006, or are we talking about another level of party unity? I hold by my warning in the post above that it’s perfectly possible to throw a (unified) party and have no one come.