Independents are idiosyncratic

By Dave Anderson:

There are very few people who hold opinions that are within a few percent of the median American voter's position on ten medium to high salience issues.  There just are not that many people who are that wishy-washy on multiple issues and who are also paying attention to politics.  I say this as both a political observer and as a political data geek who has seen issue group polling and other predictive/micro-targetting data.

Digby makes the point that the American political elite thinks that there is a great swath of non-aligned voters who truly express either an intense desire for the Beltway Consensus or for a moderate position on everything. 

The number of independents out there is quite large and all national politicians need to reach them in elections in order to win. But the knee jerk assumption that they are always more moderate than everyone else is probably wrong. They might just be more cranky, more cynical, more uninformed, more skeptical or more impatient. There are a lot of reasons why someone might be an independent in American politics but I suspect that ideology is at the bottom of the list.

I vote that most indepdents are idiosyncratic. Here is a short link from such an "independent" or swing voter from the 2006 election.  The key thing to know is that Jeff Habay, the guy's son, was a Republican state rep who was then up on multiple public corruption charges of which he was later convicted:

There are still some districts that Democrats need the Republicans to be fake anthrax mailing, conspiracy theorists for us to win in.  And by the way, I got to canvass Jeff Habay's immediate family this weekend, and that was a very interesting conversation as to how Mellissa Hart was Rick Santorum's right hand in destroying such a fine young man, and therefore they were planning to vote for Altmire.  I would categorize these individuals as very soft support in 2008.

The Habay family voting pattern was mostly likely 2004 party line Republican, 2006 split ticket, favoring most Dems, and 2008 party line Republican.  According to the political elite, they would be "independents;" according to me they would be idiosyncratic voters responding to highly personal motivations for their votes. 

This was probably the most idiosyncratic reason for swing-voter behavior, but I know in my canvassing experience, there are very few balancers, while there are numerous idiosyncratic reasons that prompted swing voter behavior.