Affective Leaning Independents: Capturing the partisan feelings of two-click independents

Pure independents, who represent about ten percent of Americans, are defined by the lack of partisan structure in their political attitudes, behaviors, and preferences. We demonstrate that many of these people are willing to reveal underlying partisan preferences through the partisan feeling thermometers. Accounting for these feelings reveals a clear and stable partisan structure to their attitudes. Leveraging existing cross-sectional, panel surveys, and original data, we demonstrate that: 1) Most pure independents have an affective lean. 2) Affective-leaning independents have distinctly partisan attitudes, behaviors, and preferences. 3) Affective lean is directionally stable over time. Building on these findings, we propose a new measure of party identification – Partisan Identity 9 (PID9). This measure builds on the traditional Party Identification 7 (PID7) measure by splitting the pure independent category into three categories. PID9 meaningfully improves model performance and provides powerful insights into the political attitudes, behaviors, and preferences of American independents.

*Under Review