Want to win? Get the non-party voters | Bill Cotterell

It’s an odd coincidence in Florida political history that — just as the Republican Party took the lead in statewide voter registration — independent voters have become such a driving force in our elections.

They’re commonly called NPAs, meaning “no party affiliation.” The Division of Elections has an actual “Independent Party” registered, along with a few minor splinter groups ranging from environmentalists to libertarians, but anyone not a Democrat or Republican is generally referred to as an independent — with a small i.

State records listed 14,461,755 registered voters in October. There were 5.2 million Republicans and 4.9 million Democrats, with about 261,000 minor-party voters and almost 4 million NPAs.

So, if everybody voted for their party’s nominees, the Republicans would win every statewide race — which they did this year, though not because of the growing GOP bulge in registration. Gov. Ron DeSantis must have won a chunk of Democrats, since he flipped Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, and he beat Charlie Crist by nearly 20% statewide.

Post-election analyses indicated DeSantis got 53% of the NPA vote, while Crist polled about 45%.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., also cruised to re-election and Republicans won all three state Cabinet seats. The party holds a 28-12 super majority in the state Senate and an 85-35 advantage in the House, along with two-to-one dominance in Florida’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives.

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The NPAs have been the fastest-growing segment of the electorate for a while now, so attracting their votes — if not signing them up officially — has to be key to any candidate’s strategy. Following this year’s Florida wipeout, winning more independents must be Job One on any Democratic rebuilding plan.

It might be prudent to start by figuring out why people choose the no-party column, rather than registering Republican or Democratic.

Even among party members, there’s always a lot of ticket-splitting, voters who pick the person rather than the party. Probably some people who sign up at a remote location, like the DMV or a school, just do so to be good citizens and have no intention of really going to the polls.

And there are probably many “a pox on both your houses” residents, who want to vote but don’t care for either party. In Florida, that means they can’t vote in the primaries.

There was an unsuccessful effort to have open primaries a while back, which both parties opposed. Everybody may vote in primaries in which only Democrats or only Republicans run, but the leadership prevents that by getting somebody to pose as a write-in contender, closing a primary to non-party voters.

There’s a good argument for closed primaries. If you want to pick a party’s nominee for an office, it’s reasonable to join that party.

But bringing NPAs into the primaries would have a leavening effect. If they had to appeal to moderate, centrist voters — rather than running hard to the right — Republicans wouldn’t have to always out-conservative each other. The same goes for Democrats, who now fight to see who can be more “progressive” (which they prefer to “liberal”) than competitors.

Away from Florida, where DeSantis outpolled Crist by 6% among NPAs, those independents were important for Democrats in close races. Sen.-elect John Fetterman won independents by 18% in Pennsylvania. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona won re-election with a 16% edge among independents. Up in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp polled 1% better among the no-party voters.

Clearly, the NPAs are turned off by extremes on either edge of the partisan spectrum, especially the election deniers Donald Trump endorsed in several states.

Obviously, neither party has much hope of poaching votes from each other’s registered members. If there’s a path back for Florida Democrats, it must lie with those who don’t sign up with either established party.

Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat capitol reporter who writes a twice-weekly column. He can be reached at bcotterell@tallahassee.com

Editor's note: An earlier version of this column incorrectly identified Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Want to win? Get the non-party voters | Bill Cotterell