Independent Voters:

A New Constituency for Political Reform

Cathy L. Stewart

Chair, New York County Independence Party

Delivered at the Saratoga Springs

League of Women Voters

January 18^th, 2006

225 Broadway, Suite 2010

New York, NY 10007

Telephone: 212-609-2800

I want to thank the League of Woman Voters for the opportunity to speak with all of you tonight.

Everyone is talking about political reform. It is the topic of daily newspaper articles and editorials across the state. In early January, the empire Center for NY State Policy released a new poll by the Sienna College Research Institute outlining New Yorkers feelings about the need for political reform. You won’t be surprised by what their polling found:

· A majority (58%) of voters are dissatisfied with the performance of state government and feel special interests have too much influence.

· 68% would like to see term limits at the state level.

· 72% would like to have the right to Initiative and Referendum—allowing voters to place proposed laws on the ballot.

· 74% of voters support nonpartisan redistricting.

While support for reform is clearly widespread, the critical issue is how will reform ever happen? How can we expect a state or federal government that so benefits from a corrupt and exclusionary process—a system where the majority of elections are noncompetitive—to reform itself?

The engine for political reform lies outside the two major parties and outside government. It lies in a social movement at its earliest stages in this country—the independent political movement that is organizing at the grassroots. The numbers of Americans who self identify as independents ranges anywhere from 35 to 45%! In New York State there are 2.6 million voters who belong to no party or who have joined the Independence Party, and millions more who are independent minded and chose to register in a party to participate in primaries.

Who are these independent minded voters? While we span the political spectrum from left to right, we share a concern about the political process itself. Independents believe that partisanship is eroding our democracy and impeding our capacity to move forward developmentally on any of the issues we face from poverty to health care to foreign policy. Independents are reform minded and anti-corruption. And as independent Americans begin to organize and build a grassroots movement, you can see the potential and connection to achieving genuine political reform.

Tonight I would like to share three examples of independents impacting. Let me start our tour on the West Coast---in California.

This past November, the voters placed a proposition on the ballot—Prop 77—that would have reformed redistricting in CA and taken it out of the partisan hands of the state legislature. Governor Schwarzenegger backed the proposal—in part because he genuinely supports the reform and in part because the Republicans felt that it would benefit them. The Committee for an Independent Voice (CIV), which is a grassroots organization of independent voters across the state and a strong proponent of nonpartisan political reforms, came on board the campaign for Prop 77. There are 3 million independent voters in CA!

This would be an important political reform that would help make elections more competitive and give those independents an opportunity to participate meaningfully in selecting their representatives. So, the campaign coalition is developing, and reform minded Republicans are coming on board, including Ted Costa and Bill Mundell, reform minded insurgent voices and successful business leaders who funded the initial petition drive to put the proposition on the ballot.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats attack Prop 77 at full throttle. It’s not that Prop 77 is not a good reform, they are seizing this as an opportunity to campaign against Schwarzenegger and use it to help set up the Governor’s race this year. In Ohio—it is just the reverse story. The Democrats in Ohio initiated a ballot proposition for nonpartisan redistricting (Question #3), and again their motives were mixed with a strong pull for reform and a move that would benefit their partisan position in the state. The Republicans in Ohio campaigned vigorously against it. Both propositions in CA and Ohio go down to defeat. The voters reacted very strongly to the partisan bickering and the reforms were lost. The question becomes---how do we get out of this fly bottle?

Well, the work of CIV in the picture offers the one ray of hope. CIV organized an alliance between the proponents of CA’s Prop 77 (Republicans) and the proponents of Ohio’s Question #3 (Democrats) to come together, put their partisan differences aside and cross endorse each others ballot proposals. They held a series of press conferences in CA and Ohio! Now this was a remarkable alliance, that came about because CIV---a modest outfit of several hundred independent minded California voters---was in a position (having no partisan agenda) to demand that they all had to transcend partisan differences or the reform would never go forward. The proposition is now coming around again, this time the Democrats are the driving force and CIV is at the table and using the experience of 2005 to try and create a more nonpartisan coalition in the state.

In Texas, independents voters are building Independent Texans (IT). It is important to note in all these examples—that the success of a new movement to change the course of political events, most especially in the earliest stages of its development, cannot be measured by what it achieves. When you are a movement of the under-recognized, the politically marginalized, a movement of independents who are barely acknowledged in the laws of electoral politics, it is difficult, very difficult to achieve anything. That is the very predicament itself. So what you have to measure is how the independent movement is causing others to act. You have to look at the motion around the independent movement. And there is a lot of motion around the movement in Texas!

Carole Strayhorn, as some of you may know, is the Republican Comptroller in Texas. She is running for Governor and is challenging the seated Governor—Republican Rick Perry. Strayhorn, kind of a populist figure, a supporter of I and R, has made a connection to IT over the years and to Linda Curtis, the leader of IT. The deadline for filing candidacies in Texas was two weeks ago. Carol Strayhorn announced that she was running for governor as an independent.

In precise political terms here for a moment—this blew the lid off the Texas Superdome. The media went wild. The Republican Party was outraged. They attacked Carole as a deserter—the head of the RP in Texas ceremoniously took her picture off the wall of Republican state headquarters. The Republicans said that she only decided to run as an independent because she couldn’t beat Rick Perry in an Republican primary. That was quite interesting to me, because generally speaking, when a Republican can’t beat another Republican in a Republican primary, they decide not to run at all! They don’t—as a rule—walk away from their own party, and announce as an independent. But Carole Strayhorn did. Why? Is she just a particularly feisty person?

She is feisty to be sure, but that’s not the only reason. Was it because her pollster told her that she could win as an independent? I am sure that he did, but that’s not the whole picture either.

She did it because of Independent Texans and Linda Curtis at their helm showing Carole that the independent voter is out there—looking for leadership and partners. She did it because Kinky Friedman, a singer and mystery writer and personality had already announced he was running as an independent, had signed up to become an honorary member of IT, and with almost no money, was showing at 10% in the polls. She did it because the most astute and forward looking politicians in America today can see that public confidence in the two-party system is waning. Having a connection with Independent Texans and seeing that the movement has real leadership, in different communities means they can begin to take steps in the direction of the independent movement.

Texas has been in the spotlight of corruption scandals, because of Tom DeLay. Somebody commented recently that even when the Republicans hand the Democrats a smoking gun, the Democrats proceed to shoot themselves in the foot with it.

National surveys tell us over and over again that confidence in the Republican leadership is declining, but it is not being replaced by confidence in Democratic leadership. And that’s because distrust in partisanship is at an all time high.

So, Independent Texans is a quantitatively small organization that is qualitatively, historically large. When IT sits down with Carole and her campaign manager and says there are 4 million independents in the state of Texas and we know how to talk to them and we believe they are the key to developing our democracy and responding to the crisis of partisanship. Then Carole Strayhorn listens, and sits down with her advisors and the $8 million dollars she has raised for the campaign and they decide they should do this.

What IT and CIV have done is to identify reform of the political process as a fundamental issue of our time.

Let me now bring us home to New York and share with you how this looks on the ground in New York City. In New York, the Independence Party has become the voice for independent voters and political reform. In New York City, we have built a partnership with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In 2001, the Independence Party gave the Mayor his margin of victory with 59,000 votes on our line. We had many dialogues about the need to reform the political process in New York City and the fact that there are close to a million voters in the city who are independents and are barred from meaningful participation in selecting their local representatives for the City Council, because most determinative decisions are made in the partisan primaries, where independents cannot vote.

We asked him to champion nonpartisan municipal elections, a simple reform that would extend full voting right to all NYC voters. He agreed. In 2003 he put it on the ballot and partnered with the IP in a hotly fought election. Though NPE failed, it helped to brand the Mayor as a genuine anti-clubhouse reformer and the IP as the sole political party willing to put a wholesome democratic process ahead of its own narrower interests, since the adoption of nonpartisan elections would take away IP’s power to cross-endorse candidates in city races.

In 2005, we partnered with the Mayor again in his re-election campaign. It was an extraordinary year. We polled 75,000 votes on the IP line—that is one out of 10 Bloomberg voters. These voters are independent minded New Yorkers who were not only voting for Mike Bloomberg as an independent, but also making a statement about their own independence. In addition, 47% of the African American community broke away from the Democratic Party and voted for independent republican Michael Bloomberg.

That is an historic shift in the Black community. The basic paradigm in New York City politics has been that the black community is not wanted by the Republican Party and therefore can be thoroughly ignored by the Democratic Party. That arrangement was disrupted in November. The 2005 election results show a becoming—a new alliance that is crystallizing off this season, an alliance between African Americans and independent voters. While politically and culturally very different, black voters and independent voters share in an interest in breaking out of traditional, partisan and ideologically over-determined policy making.

The partisan gridlock in Albany and Washington is a frustrating roadblock to the nonpartisan merit-based governance that we all want. The political parties themselves increasingly legislate based on what’s best for themselves and not for people—not for progress, but for the special interests. This is a major factor that is driving New Yorkers across our state towards political independence.

People often ask me, how do we get beyond this? Independents often say don’t we need reforms to build the independent movement given all the unfairness and inequities in the system? My answer, no, because that just will never happen. We have to build the independent movement from the bottom up and build new alliances—it is only a growing movement of Americans that can force a reform agenda. That’s what the New York, Texas and California stories illustrate.