IMMEDIATE RELEASE 31 August 2026WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUNDToday’s Events in Historical PerspectiveAmerica’s Longest-Running Column, Founded 1932America’s largest political party and what it wantsBy Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift WASHINGTON – America’s largest political party is not an organized party at all, although 45 percent of the nation’s eligible voters define themselves by its capitalized name: Independents. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party each consist of 27 percent of the voters.Will Rogers once quipped, “I do not belong to any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” What he was saying is that the Democratic Party is a big tent party, but so is the Republican Party. Big tents can get unruly, but no tent is larger, more diverse, or more unruly than the Independent tent, and it is this tent that decides presidential elections as well as many congressional, state, and local elections.While various Independent splinter groups may develop platforms, the reality is that we only know where most Independents stand through opinion polls, and these polls tell us and those who would be president, etc., what they want.Independents are the ultimate swing voters. They famously took a chance on Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and chose Donald Trump over Obama’s chosen successor, Hillary Clinton, in 2016.They want to end the war President Trump started and does not know how to end.They want the Feds to stop messing with how states run elections on such issues as mail-in ballots, and they especially do not like the prospect of ICE agents monitoring polling sites in search of undocumented immigrants casting votes illegally. Independents know that such voters barely exist, if they exist at all. After all, why would an illegal immigrant take the risk? And while self-identified Independents do not like the Gestapo-like tactics of ICE, they support Trump’s broader effort to control immigration.Independent voters do not like Trump threatening to seize Greenland and Vice President J.D Vance joking about his alleged flub when he called Canada the 51st state.Independents would like to rehire many of the people Elon Musk fired without cause and get the machinery of government working again. They want to reinstate people with institutional knowledge about everything from foreign aid projects to monitoring outbreaks of measles here at home or the Ebola virus disease in Africa.A majority of Independents favor Medicare for All in combination with private supplemental insurance.Independents are advocates of tighter gun control laws, possibly such as the registration of guns and the licensing of gun owners.Independents want to strengthen Trump-damaged ties with democratic nations and recommit to NATO, the 1949 Western military alliance of 32 nations that has kept those nations safe through its Article 5 clause that an attack against one is an attack against all.In the current political environment, polls show Independents leaning toward the Democratic Party on most of these issues, and this poses a course correction problem for Republican presidential aspirants such as Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who are tied to a president at odds with these issues and polling in the low thirties and forties.In the upcoming presidential quadrennial juggling act Democrats will need to hold on to the Democratic Socialists without embracing them as they parse their positions. Republicans, confronted with a greater challenge, are fully tied to a MAGA base that is out of sync with what most Independents hold dear, and they will be compelled to shamelessly disregard hypocrisy, principles, and legacy as they embrace the nonexistent centrist platform of a nonexistent centrist party. See Eleanor Clift’s book Selecting a President, and Douglas Cohn’s latest books The President’s First Year: The Only School for Presidents Is the Presidency and World War 4: Nine Scenarios (endorsed by seven flag officers).© 2026 U.S. News Syndicate, IncDistributed by U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.END WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND
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