Minor parties, nonaffiliated voters to play larger role in future elections nonaffiliated and minor party voters may determine who wins in Oregon

By Mark Brown
March 28, 2008

Although Oregon’s political leanings haven’t made a major shift in the past four years, a small gust of party-affiliation change has blown across the state.

A decline in the overall percentage of voters registered as Republicans in the state over a four-year span has been nearly equaled by an increase in the percentage of Oregonians registered as nonaffiliated and minor party voters.And while the Democratic Party’s overall registration percentage held almost steady, this subtle tilt places a greater say in November’s general election into the hands of voters not in the traditional two major parties.

“I would stress that, if you are either a Republican or a Democrat, if you expect to win statewide elections in the future, you are going to have to win the votes of independent voters,” Portland political analyst Tim Hibbitts said. “There just aren’t enough members in either of the major parties to win elections.”

From January 2004 to January 2008, the percentage of all voters in the state who are registered Republicans dipped by 1.3 percentage points, to 35 percent. Over that same time period, the combination of nonaffiliated and minor-party registered voters rose 1.2 percentage points — from 24.8 percent of all registered voters four years ago to 26 percent this year — while the Democratic Party increased its overall percentage by a sliver, to 38.9 percent of the state’s voters.

Political observers expect a jump in the Democrats’ numbers ahead of Oregon’s May 20 primary, and they expect both parties to grow in advance of the November election.

The political shift takes place over a four-year period in which the state’s total population has grown by an average of about 1 percent a year to more than 3.7 million. Also in that time, the total number of registered voters in the state has jumped 4.6 percent, to 1,962,562.

And in Lane County, over that same time, the number of nonaffiliated and minor party voters has increased by more than 8 percent to 50,065, which is 26.2 percent of all registered voters in the county.

That growth is just a small part of a decades-long trend that has seen the number of independent voters in the state increase from around 10 percent in the early 1980s to its current level of more than a quarter of all registered voters, said Hibbitts, of Portland polling firm Davis, Hibbitts & Midghall Inc.

Since Ross Perot’s presidential bid in 1992, the growth of nonaffiliated and minor party voters has “slowed from a trend to more of a trickle,” Hibbitts said, but it is a trickle he sees continuing in the coming years.

Of the minor parties, the three largest are the Independent, Libertarian and Pacific Green.

The Independent Party of Oregon, although numerically a very minor player with only 14,400 registered voters, has quickly grown to become the state’s third-largest party — behind the Democrats’ 764,255 voters and the Republicans’ 687,898 voters — since its inception in January 2007.

Linda Williams, a Portland attorney and chairwoman of the state Independent Party, said about 28 percent of her party’s new members were previously nonaffiliated, while another 30 percent have come in almost equal numbers from the Democratic and Republican parties. The rest of her young party’s members, she said, were not previously registered.

“I can’t make any prediction about what kind of candidates these people might end up supporting, because they come from all over the map,” Williams said.

More than 1,200 Lane County residents, 705 of whom live in Eugene, have registered as Independents, according to party statistics.

One thing many of the Independents have in common is their youth. Williams says 40 percent of Independent Party members are 30 years old or younger.

“The younger voters are just more shrewd about advertising and marketing, so they just don’t identify as much with a major-party label,” Williams said.

Some of the voters moving from the two major parties to the Independent Party or nonaffiliated status are probably doing so because of their former parties’ support of certain issues, Oregon State University political scientist Bill Lunch said.

Disgruntled Democrats in rural counties can’t stomach the party’s land use and anti-logging environmental stances, which they see as “overly influential,” he said, while some moderate Republicans are upset with the invasion of Iraq or don’t want to be affiliated with the party’s continuing support of conservative social values.

Others just find that their political beliefs have skewed to the left or right of the major parties.

But some of those voters are unprepared to make a wholesale leap from one major party to another, Lunch said.

Instead, they register as nonaffiliated or minor-party members.

“One of the reasons is because family political history can be a big part of a person’s personal identity,” Lunch said. “It’s a difficult switch for people to make psychologically.”

Family initially played a part in Eugene resident Charity Yates’ political affiliation. She grew up in a conservative Republican family, but wound up switching her registration to nonaffiliated after she moved to Oregon from Arizona in the early 1980s.

“I think family history does make a big difference,” said Yates, 66, adding that she drifted from her conservative roots and now votes for whichever candidate she connects with, regardless of political party.

“It was a very gradual change,” she said. “It was just part of growing up.”

But for Eugene resident Trevor Duncan, 23, family had nothing to do with his choice to register at age 18 as a nonaffiliated voter. Instead, he decided that his political beliefs were square pegs to the major parties’ round holes.

“I just don’t feel like I fit completely with any one party,” said Duncan, noting that he voted for George W. Bush in 2004 but could cast a ballot for Barack Obama in November. “There are things I like about both parties, but there are also things I don’t care for about either of them.”

Edward Botsch, 51, of Eugene, recently switched from Republican to the Independent Party of Oregon after becoming disenchanted with what he sees as partisan bickering and the overwhelming influence of money in major-party politics.

“The media shows politicians as being either far right or far left, even though most people are more in the center,” he said. “The majority of people, if you want my opinion, believe in issues on both sides. But I think most politicians serve the people who pay them.”

Although nonaffiliated and minor party voters often claim frustration with the major party they once supported, Jim Moore, a political science assistant professor at Pacific University in Forest Grove, says that many of them will still back a party-line when it comes to election time.

“The nonaffiliated numbers are large and growing,” Moore said. “But when push comes to shove, many of them will vote the same way they would have before they switched from the Republican party or the Democrats.”

However, the only guarantee in the months leading up to this year’s general election is that registration numbers across the board will skyrocket as registration drives build steam, Moore said.

“People are just going to be coming out of the woodwork to register, because this year is a transformative election,” Moore said. “No matter who wins, it is going to take us in a new direction. That creates a lot of excitement.”