President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

I'd guess that what you're describing in the case of a good chunk of those people. ... is still just pragmaticism. We have a system that gives you two choices. Most people hold their nose and pick one. Even if they pick people from one party most of the time, it doesn't mean their self-identification as "independent" isn't true. Independent doesn't necessarily mean that you believe in nothing and every election you get out a dartboard, nor does it mean that your beliefs (whatever they are) are so pliable than you go back and forth between things. What if a lot of those people identify with one party 54 percent and the other party 46 percent, but really wish we had a third party they identified with 80 percent?

When you only have two choices. ... most people go with the choice that they think is closest to what they value, even if they are pretty disastisifed with the choices. It's not surprising to me that most people would choose one thing more consistently than the other, simply because it comes closer to what they stand for .

The question for me, at least is what if they had more than those two choices? Would they still be "de facto" partisans?

Also, maybe I am an anomoly, but the "choose the same party" thing definitely doesn't make me into a de facto partisan. I vote for wacky third party candidates a lot of the time. Like I used to cast votes for Ralph Nadar, who I thought was a dipshit and had just about everything in life wrong, but 1) I knew he wasn't going to win, but 2) bif he got some votes, I hoped maybe it could somehow lead to more than two choices and break the two-party monopoly. So I was choosing for entirely non-partisan reasons.

Among the two parties, I have voted for Democrats way more than Republicans in the last 20+ years. But there is zero about me that identfied with anything those politicians were saying they stood for, and I might identify with the stuff their party says it stands for less than I identify with the other party. For me, the choice always had zero to do with "partisanship." For example, the first time Barack Obama ran, I knew he was going to win, and I said to myself, "We're going to get our first black president finally, and I don't want to be the guy who didn't vote for him." I voted for Joe Biden in the last election -- who I can't stand as a politicians and knew would be bad for the country -- but it was an "anyone but Trump" vote. Give me what I considered a better choice (pretty much any candidate other than Joe Biden or Donald Trump who had a realistic chance of winning), and I would have voted for that person instead.

 

Right. There are so many people in NYC who are registered democrats simply because the democratic primary decides just about every local seat where they live. Since we're talking de factos. ... the primary is the de facto election.

I am registered as an independent, and right around election time I always get someone trying to tell me I should register as a democrat for that reason.