State of independents

IN DECEMBER, at a law office in downtown Portland, Maine, two successful businessmen met to talk politics. The host was Angus King, who served two terms as governor of Maine in the 1990s and is now back at work in the private sector. The visitor was Christy Mihos, former president and CEO of Christy’s Markets, who had driven up from his Cape Cod home to ask King one of the most intriguing questions in American politics today: Who needs political parties?

King didn’t. When he ran as an independent in 1994, he beat Democrat Joe Brennan, a former governor and member of Congress, and Republican Susan Collins, who later became a US senator. He was reelected in 1998 by a wide margin, the same year Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota. Connecticut elected former Congressman Lowell Weicker as an independent governor in 1990. And, as King pointed out to Mihos that day, the trail had already been blazed for him in Maine by Jim Longley, who won the governorship as an independent in 1974.

If an independent candidate can win in Maine, Connecticut, and Minnesota, why not Massachusetts?

Massachusetts has no such precedent in the past century. And Mihos, a former member of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority board, isn’t sure yet whether it’s worth a try. A lifelong Republican, he says he would like to run for governor in the GOP primary. But his public battles in 2001 and 2002 with then-Governor Jane Swift over proposed toll increases – Swift tried to fire him but lost in court – mark him as something less than a party loyalist. Now, with his party’s establishment lining up behind Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, he is considering an independent campaign.

And why not? The Massachusetts Republican Party, despite its success in holding the governor’s office since 1990, is hardly a powerful machine. Only 13 percent of the state’s 4 million voters register as Republicans, while 49 percent decline to enroll in either party. As Mihos said in a recent interview, “Running as an independent, I’d be representing the largest bloc of registered voters in the Commonwealth.”

Understanding that bloc of voters is crucial for any statewide candidate. They are not a homogenous group, nor do they tend to show up on voting day as reliably as party members do. And, as King advised Mihos, it can be difficult to sell them on an untested outsider. “The biggest problem an independent has is initially convincing a significant number of voters that they have a chance, that it’s not a wasted vote,” King said.

As the 2006 political season begins, a successful independent run by Mihos looks like a long shot. The number of people who can imagine him as governor is probably still in the single digits. But seasoned political observers say that the right kind of independent candidate, coming along at the right time, could do in Massachusetts what King did in Maine.

For an example of the wrong candidate at the wrong time, one only has to recall the campaign of Leonard Umina, a Marlborough executive who ran for governor in 1990 on the Independent High Tech ticket. He won barely 3 percent of the vote. The overwhelming favorite of the unaffilated voters that year was Republican William Weld. And when Weld was reelected in 1994 with 71 percent of the vote, he seemed to have taken the entire independent vote and then some.

Weld’s election brought high hopes among Republicans that Massachusetts was on the verge of partisan realignment. The GOP also elected Joe Malone as state treasurer in 1990 and held 16 out of 40 state senate seats, the highest level since 1959, according to Larry Overlan, author of “Time for a Change: The Return of the Republican Party in Massachusetts” (1992). But the party has only lost ground since then, as Overlan, who teaches state and local government courses at Bentley College, concedes. The fact that Republicans have continued to win in gubernatorial races suggests that the majority of independents lean toward the GOP, he said. Yet the party “can’t get anybody elected at the lower levels.” For that matter, all 12 members of Congress from Massachusetts are Democrats.

Democrats, of course, tend to see the state’s unenrolled voters as closet Democrats. If they lean Republican, asks former governor Michael Dukakis, “how come they’re voting Democratic in presidential races, decisively?” Dukakis, who teaches at Northeastern University, attributes the election of Republican governors to the conviction among independents that a Democratic legislature needs to be held in check. Unenrolled voters “lean Democratic,” Dukakis said, but to succeed, a candidate for the corner office has to maintain a reputation for independence so as to defuse fears among voters “who are concerned that since the Democrats control such a huge majority in the Legislature, they’ll run away with the place.”

Others argue that independent voters don’t lean uniformly toward either party. Unquestionably, most of those who voted for the Republican Weld in 1994 also went for Democrat Bill Clinton as president in 1996.

John Avlon, author of “Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics” (2004), argues that Weld and Clinton represent the kind of centrism the two parties don’t consistently offer. Avlon, who has worked both for Clinton and for New York Republican Rudolph Giuliani, said Weld’s success in the 1990s shows how many voters here are looking for a candidate who is willing to hold the line against tax increases while articulating pro-education, pro-environment, and pro-business policies. Weld, who supported gay rights and abortion rights, was also blatantly out of step with national Republican positions.

For Avlon, that’s a formula for winning support from independents. “It’s about people who are deeply alienated from the establishment Democratic party,” Avlon said, “but unwilling to realign Republican, because they’re alienated by the influence of the far right nationally.”

King describes his campaigns in Maine the same way. “I was a businessman and uncomfortable with the Democrats’ proclivity to tax and spend,” he said. “And I was a social moderate and uncomfortable with the direction of the Republican party on the social issues.”

Avlon notes that Massachusetts is not unique in its high proportion of independent voters. Maine and New Hampshire both have about 38 percent of their voters registering as independents. The number of independents has tripled in Florida since 1994. “The most significant demographic shift in American politics over the last 10 years, no question, has been the rising tide of independent voters in this country,” Avlon said. According to the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, non-major party registration increased

to 21.7 percent of eligible voters in 2004. In 1960, only 1.6 percent registered as independents.

What makes Massachusetts stand out is that independents have been a major part of the political culture for a long time – going back to the late 1940s, when the Republican Party began to lose its once powerful hold on Massachusetts politics. By 1948, Democrats and Republicans each accounted for 25 percent of registered voters, with 49 percent uaffilliated. Democrats gained ground in the 1960s and 1970s but the proportion of independents still hovered between 35 and 40 percent.

The 1990s brought a significant change. Veteran Massachusetts pollster Lou DiNatale notes that the voter rolls jumped from 3.2 million in 1990 to almost 4.1 million in 2004 – at a time when the state was not gaining in population. No one is quite sure who these new voters are, but not many became Democrats and Republicans. In fact, 64.5 percent of the increase from 1990 to 2004 was in unenrolled voters. DiNatale claims the new voters don’t turn out in high numbers, especially for party primaries.

“They’re not really voters yet, and they haven’t picked a party,” he said.

Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin notes that in the most recent presidential election, George W. Bush, who didn’t put much effort into winning John Kerry’s home state, was able to take 37 percent of the vote. That’s up from the 32 percent Bush got here when he faced Al Gore. Galvin calls that “a significant statistic.”

“Massachusetts people have always been independent,” Dukakis said. He points out that in 1960 John F. Kennedy carried the state by more than half a million votes in the presidential race. That same year, the state’s independent-minded voters elected Republican John Volpe to the governor’s office.

Dave Denison, former editor of CommonWealth magazine, is a freelance writer living in Arlington.