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David Thornburgh

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    Voting

    Independent voters want to be heard. Is anybody listening?

    David Thornburgh
    John Opdycke
    May 24, 2022
    Independent voters want to be heard. Is anybody listening?

    Thornburgh is a former CEO of the Committee of Seventy and current chair of that organization’s Ballot PA campaign to repeal closed primaries in Pennsylvania. Opdycke is the president of Open Primaries.

    The American electorate is more “anti-party” than at any time since Adams and Jefferson inaugurated America’s first major political feud. According to Gallup, independents now comprise 42 percent of all voters. In states that require party registration, 49 percent of young voters choose “no party affiliation” when they register. One in two veterans identifies as a political independent.

    This trend is accelerating in red, blue and purple states. And independents are swinging national outcomes; Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden all owe their victories to surges of support from independents. In Pennsylvania, for example, exit polls suggest that the votes of independents swung 15 percent from 2016 to 2020, from Trump +7 to Biden +8. That likely provided the margin of victory in each race.

    Yet according to analyst Charlie Cook, fewer than 16 percent of congressional races will be competitive in November 2022, the winner having been decided in a primary. More than 40 percent of state legislators will run unopposed in 2022. In Pennsylvania 80 percent to 90 percent of all legislative races are essentially decided before voters cast a single ballot in November.

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    More uncertainty, an electorate ready to swing, and yet little general election competition. All the more reason we need to scrap closed partisan primaries and enact open primaries that let all voters participate. If the primaries are where the action is, let all voters vote.

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