Say "NO" to Party Affiliation
IF YOU LISTEN TO OR READ THE DAILY NEWS, you might conclude there is an epistemological divide in our country similar to the one that led to the Civil War. ‘Liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ ‘democrat’ and ‘republican,’ ‘left’ and ‘right’ are linguistic indicators of this divide. More recently, the talking heads on our mainstream media have reduced it to a simple color code when reporting election results. The blue and gray of the 19th-century Civil War have been replaced by the blue and red of the modern uncivil political cold war.
In my neighborhood, I am surrounded by people whose political views differ from mine. Yet I walk across the street to exchange greetings, chew the fat, and share food. We share many things in common, which form the basis of friendship despite our political differences. Most importantly, we do not try to proselytize one another as if our views are the only correct ones. Avoiding such differences is not what makes us friends; it is because we are friends that we avoid discussing them. We defer to our better angels and, in doing so, maintain those friendships.
That doesn’t seem to be the case in our federal politics. Our political environment in Washington is the source of division, not a bottom-up expression of it originating in our communities. Among our politicians, pejoratives define our opponents. Moral indignation at our opponents’ wrongheaded causes proves the rightness of our own. Our politicians score points with their bases by lampooning anyone who doesn’t think like them. In the contemporary language of divisiveness, opponents are either ‘woke’ or ‘stupid’. It’s almost as if widening the chasm is the goal, until we naturally secede from one another due to political distance and become two petty, feuding confederacies. The media and politicians have created this chasm using the tools of our state election boards.
According to USA Facts, a website that reports on a host of political and government issues, 70% of eligible American voters are registered with their state election board. That equates to roughly 204.6 million voters.[1] Not every state requires voters to claim party affiliation. In many states, you can claim ‘unaffiliated’ as your choice. In states with party-affiliated voter registrations, there are a total of 39.2 million registered as republicans and 45.4 million as democrats. As expected, the percentage of republican versus democrat registered voters varies greatly by state. Is this information accurately predictive of election outcomes? Who cares? It is not predictive of how we treat and interact with one another in our communities. It is an abstraction, designed by and for politicians to pigeonhole Americans into one camp or another, one color or another, one cause or another, without nuance. It is used to allow politicians to call you woke or stupid, liberal or MAGA, democrat or republican, or any other category that forces you to take a side. This does not have to be the case.
If we, as voters, refuse to claim a party affiliation during registration, politicians would have less abstract information to categorize us. Think about that. The question of your party affiliation would become irrelevant. You may still vote differently than your neighbor, but politicians and media talking heads would no longer have that ‘advance’ information to divide us. Think of how that could reduce the sensationalism of predictive outcomes during our elections. Without the abstracted, potentially erroneous voter registration affiliations, politicians and pundits would be forced to simply report what is taking place at the polls, not predict it.
Let’s take away the one thing we have complete control over by refusing to disclose political party affiliation. Neither your ideology nor your past voting record needs to be public knowledge. Let’s reclaim that anonymity and save ourselves from each other, and in doing so, send a clear message to our politicians that we are no longer playing their divide-and-conquer game in which they claim the spoils of war.
When you register to vote, just say “NO” to party affiliation.
[1] These figures assume voters have been properly vetted as eligible to vote during the registration process under the voter registration laws of their state.
