r/dataisbeautiful • u/sillychillly OC: 1 • 3d ago
Americans (in FL, NC, NV) are Registering as Unaffiliated more than any other party, especially young Americans.
Looking at 3 swing states (FL, NV, NC), we can see that Americans are registering more as Unaffiliated than either major party. This is especially true for young americans who overwhelmingly register as Unaffiliated.
This shows what most of us know, there is a growing disillusionment with both major parties. It's not that people are moving from the Democrats to the Republicans, it's that people are disavowing both parties and registering as Unaffiliated.
I hope you all can see, like myself, that the most recent NYT voter registration article missed a major portion of the voter registration analysis and is about as close to journalistic or data analytic malpractice as one could get. It almost seems intentional.
______________
Big thanks to the team for pumping and organizing the data!
tool used: Tableau
data source: Florida voter list from Florida Secretary of State: https://dos.fl.gov/
Register to vote: https://vote.gov
——————
Contact your reps:
Senate: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm?Class=1
House of Representatives: https://contactrepresentatives.org/
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u/vtTownie 3d ago
NC has open primaries, no incentive to register. I get to vote in any primary I want (only one per election)
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u/sillychillly OC: 1 3d ago
i think this is a key point.
i think before there was pride in being a democrat and now because the democrats have sucked so badly, people would rather play a strategic role than be a proud member of a political party.
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u/lew_rong 2d ago
I just don't want the metric ton of junk mail that I watched my parents get growing up.
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u/SOILSYAY 2d ago
This is more or less the move in SC as well. Most of the time, an R next to your name in SC all but guarantees you win. As such, even if you’re more likely to vote D in a national election, a lot of folks remain undeclared so they can vote for the lesser of 2 evils in the GOP primaries.
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u/atchn01 3d ago
This anecdotal, but I know plenty of unaffiliated voters. I know very few who are actually unaffiliated in practice. They are almost all Deomcrats or Republicans by another name.
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u/working_and_whatnot 3d ago
This. and it may not be advantageous to skip one of the big party affiliations because many states have closed primary elections, so the unaffiliated are unable to have any say until the general election (when the choices are usually much worse).
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u/fatnino 2d ago
As if primaries matter in any of the later states...
The only outcome of registering party preference that I have found is to make it easier for the state to gerimander your vote out of existence.
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u/Mattagascar 3d ago
I’m one and it’s so I avoid a lot of the spam calls and solicitations during primary season
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u/konnichi1wa 3d ago
You get bombarded by more ads as an unaffiliated (from both parties), but you get in less family arguments for being an opposing party member too.
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u/sillychillly OC: 1 3d ago
This makes sense and corroborates what we see in the data.
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u/andersonb47 3d ago
Not exaggerating when I say that I’ve never met a single person who labels themselves as an independent who isn’t just a Republican.
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u/unassumingdink 2d ago
How many people told you they were left leaning independents, and you accused them of being secret Republicans?
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u/andersonb47 2d ago
I’m not accusing anyone of anything. Just relating my personal experience. HOPE THATS OK WITH YOU
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u/unassumingdink 2d ago
My personal experience is that when I tell liberals that I'm a leftist who hates Democrats, they try to spin my political identity into something else.
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u/orroro1 3d ago
Maybe it's more accurate to say we are either liberal or conservative in practice, and we disavow any association with the Big Money controlled Democrat or Republican parties. And are they even that different though? Both equally obsessed with DEI (albeit in opposite directions), and both more concerned with enacting their irrational and extremist immigration policies than improving the lives of actual Americans. Neither espouse any even vaguely liberal or conservative principles.
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u/lazyFer 3d ago
Yep.
Republicans that don't want to admit they're Republican because on some level they know how fucking awful Republicans are.
Democrats living in Republican states are rightfully fearful of the Dictatorship the Republicans are pushing and don't want a party affiliation to be able to be sent to the Dictator.
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u/kanguhrus 3d ago
people that think like this are the reason political discourse is how it is, both parties are more similar than different. There are going to be issues where you agree with the other side of the aisle that’s just reality
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u/midwestck 3d ago
There is a lot of room for improvement with the presentation style.
The conclusion's frame of reference is current state, but the data is presented as a trend. The general trend does not clearly indicate that %Unaffiliated is increasing, which compromises the impact of the conclusion.
The two data points that stand out to me are 18-24 shifting away from Democrat from 2020 to 2024 and 25-34 shifting toward Republican from 2020 to 2024. You could use relative registration rates to tease out whether those trends occurred due to rising Unaffiliated or a shift from Democrat to Republican. It's not easy to infer from the disproportionate peaks with sharp drop-offs.
And a longer time horizon with election cycle as the time granularity to understand the actual trend.
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u/TuckerDidIt 3d ago
Honest question - would party registration affect gerrymandering, or do they use other data like race, age, etc?
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u/sillychillly OC: 1 3d ago
Probably. I don’t know the extent to which gerrymandering uses party affiliation, but I assume it’s used heavily
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u/roberbear 2d ago
I'm unaffiliated but vote 100% Democratic. I just got annoyed at DMV that I had to fill it out in that moment after they made me wait 3 hours for my new ID. It had nothing to do with anything but hanger.
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u/FractalHarvest 3d ago
They're just embarrassed to admit they vote one way or another
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u/canisdirusarctos 3d ago
It’s the safest way to avoid getting on the extermination/gulag list if the wrong group takes power.
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u/YouWereBrained 3d ago
And they usually vote Republican even though they are “goddamned independent”.
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u/CMAJ-7 3d ago
In most places this just gives you less power (no vote in primaries) with no upside. Parties aren’t like people, they’re vehicles for the dialectic between opposing sectors of society. Think of them as two cars that have each had their own long history of drivers: the cars themselves are not good or bad, but the driver history can be- and can improve/worsen with a new driver, eventually becoming something completely different.
Tldr: party affiliation isn’t meant to be a personal statement of values; they’re vehicles for strategy and winning the ‘game’ of democracy, regardless of how close your opinion is to the majority/median.
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u/Ill-Opinion-1754 3d ago
Florida registered independent here: They want to divide us (through race, wealth, political affiliation, gender, etc) and while we’re too busy being distracted by their narrative they will continue pulling the strings. Don’t be a lemming, think for yourself.
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u/SandysBurner 3d ago
It isn’t possible that other people have come to different conclusions than you have? Anybody registered with a party is a lemming? Fuck outta here with that. Enjoy your political irrelevance.
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u/Ill-Opinion-1754 3d ago
It is, and I hope they make informed decision opposed to following echo chambers. And to be clear I didn’t associate being in a registered party as being a lemming. It was a general statement, fuck outa here with that inferred conclusion.
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u/WhiteBoyWithAPodcast 3d ago
When wasn’t the US divided by race in your opinion?
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u/Ill-Opinion-1754 3d ago
I never eluded to the US not having racial issues, unfortunately there will always be prejudice.
I’m stating the powers that be prey on the weak minded by touching on hot button topics to distract, race being a card to play.
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u/Ooficus 3d ago
Am young, am Floridian, am unaffiliated, I don’t like either party, frankly I don’t like the two party system either. I do vote what is best in my interests which happens to be more aligned with one party by far than the other.
What does disappoint me though is how many of my classmates back when I was in school said they weren’t going to vote.
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u/joe37373737 3d ago
This is goodness. No party should feel like they have somebody's vote locked up. Candidates should have to win votes every time. Anyone who blindly votes along party lines is just as evil as the parties themselves.
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u/kanguhrus 3d ago
Ya both parties are dog shit how is this surprising
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u/WhiteBoyWithAPodcast 3d ago
Yeah one is building camps and the other one is expanding access to healthcare.
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u/FloridianHeatDeath 3d ago
Ones set on becoming Nazi Germany, and the other is playing a mix of English/French politics for that era.
Ie, say a lot of nice things but give in at every meaningful opportunity or self sabotage, nepotism, and infighting.
I say this as a former democrat, now independent, albeit still a democratic voter for every election.
I, like a large amount of others have lost faith in almost the entirety of Democratic leadership. They’re more concerned with cronyism over competence. AOC being sidelined for an 80 year old dying of cancer and the Democrats complete failure to rally around the NYC race are only the most recent examples.
Until most of the current democratic leadership dies and they lose power, I don’t think they’ll be of any use in opposing the Republicans at this point.
Will I still vote democratic if only out of hope? Yes. But don’t pretend for a moment that the democratic leadership aren’t full of self serving scum.
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u/WhiteBoyWithAPodcast 2d ago
I, like a large amount of others have lost faith in almost the entirety of Democratic leadership. They’re more concerned with cronyism over competence. AOC being sidelined for an 80 year old dying of cancer and the Democrats complete failure to rally around the NYC race are only the most recent examples.
Considering the cartoonish open corruption of the current administration and their party, this is what you consider 'cronyism'?
I assume you're joking.
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u/FloridianHeatDeath 2d ago
Just because the current administration is quite literally rolling down the slope enthusiastically into fascism does not mean standards for what a good politician and party should lower.
I’ll support Democrats for now, if only because there is no other reasonable option. But make no mistake, there are severe systemic issues in the Democratic Party. The leadership is beyond incompetent and mostly focused on the status quote and keeping their own asses safe.
If their only opposition didn’t happen to be worse, I’d enthusiastically campaign against them.
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u/TraditionalBackspace 2d ago
I'm sure most of the country doesn't identify with the extreme right or the extreme left politically, which is what both parties are slowly (one much less slowly) becoming. I know I changed my affiliation to NPP because of this.
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u/fnupvote89 3d ago
I'm a Floridian. I registered independent when I registered to vote. 18 years later, I switched to the Democratic party for obvious reasons. Fuck the Grand Old Fascist Party.
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u/Blutrumpeter 2d ago
Why would I choose to get mail from some organization that doesn't really care about me? Sure I mostly vote for one side but that's just because the other side is evil
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u/notyomamasusername 2d ago
We live in NC and my wife changed her affiliation to "Unaffiliated" because she was worried eventually the voter registration would be pulled and used for discriminatory purposes. (We have friends from Hungary who told us their stories)
A couple of other people we know did the same.
I've always been UNA.
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u/TheOneEyedWolf 2d ago
If I could register as an independent in PA and still participate in primaries I would.
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u/Mark8472 2d ago
Honest question from a non-US American: Why do people register as voters for one party in the first place? Isn't an election supposed to be equal, free and secret (!) for everyone?
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u/blaicefreeze 1d ago
I feel like you should do this anyways personally, however, it might have the reverse effect where you get shit mail from both republicans and democrats…
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u/moos3yfate 3d ago
As a Florida person, we have closed primaries, so being affiliated means you can't vote in primaries for either party. Im technically registered "rebuplican" puke with the hope that I can make a difference in infiltrating my vote with someone MAGA isn't backing. Its an absolute longshot with how f'd Florida has been... but here we are.... where are the Epstein files?
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u/13374L 3d ago
I think registering as anything but independent is dumb. Parties and candidates should earn your vote every single election.
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u/WaterNerd518 3d ago
You don’t have to vote for the party you register as. You can vote for any candidate you want. Also, in many states you can only vote in the primary if you’re registered for the party that is running the primary. So, if you want to affect who gets nominated to run for president, registering as an independent does not allow you to. If your state is like that, you should register for the party that you want to participate in choosing the nominee for. This is arguably a much larger impact than voting for 1 of 2 people you had no part in nominating for the position.
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u/eric5014 3d ago
In Australia, we don't have this sort of party affiliation. Every adult citizen goes on the electoral roll, which has nothing to do with parties. Not many people are actually party members - I think it's under 1%.
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u/cmb15300 3d ago
This isn't surprising in the least, given that my only political affiliation at this point is Donald Trump's a piece of garbage
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u/sillychillly OC: 1 3d ago edited 3d ago
Looking at 3 swing states (FL, NV, NC), we can see that Americans are registering more as Unaffiliated than either major party. This is especially true for young americans who overwhelmingly register as Unaffiliated.
This shows what most of us know, there is a growing disillusionment with both major parties. It's not that people are moving from the Democrats to the Republicans, it's that people are disavowing both parties and registering as Unaffiliated.
I hope you all can see, like myself, that the most recent NYT voter registration article missed a major portion of the voter registration analysis and is about as close to journalistic or data analytic malpractice as one could get. It almost seems intentional.
tool used: Tableau
data sources:
- Florida voter list from Florida Secretary of State: https://dos.fl.gov/
- North Carolina voter list from North Carolina Secretary of State: https://www.ncsbe.gov/results-data/voter-registration-data
- Nevada voter list from Nevada Secretary of State: https://www.nvsos.gov/sos
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u/ferretface99 3d ago
It’s going to be illegal to vote democratic soon. Oh, you need to have your birth certificate in order to vote… but I see you’re a republican so we’ll let it slide this once (wink wink). Oh this next one is a democrat? Go back home and get your birth certificate. I’ve got my eye on you.
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u/homeboi808 3d ago
I assume it’s mostly Democrats that don’t want their Republican parents to see they chose Democrat.
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u/Zaxbys_Cook 3d ago
One note about NC, is a lot of people will register as unaffiliated due to NC’s primary process that is semi-closed. This means that a voter can pick which primary they want to vote in. They can vote Democrat every year or Democrat in 2022 then Republican in 2024.