Arizona Public Radio | Your Source for NPR News
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Political Paries Appear to be Less Popular Among State Voters

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/knau/local-knau-919156.mp3

Phoenix, AZ – New figures from the Secretary of State's Office show 953,000
people who are signed up to vote in next week's primary listed no
political affiliation. That is approaching 31 percent of the more
than 3.1 million registered voters. In 2008, independents were
only about 27 percent of the electorate. And a decade ago, fewer
than 16 percent of those signed up to vote had declared
themselves independents. Jim Haynes, president of Behavior
Research Center said the shift is not surprising.

(What we've seen is people that believe that the parties have
both become too dogmatic, are more into power than they are into
doing good for the state, that kind of thing.)

And Haynes said surveys by his organization show that those who
reregister as independents believe that the party has left them
and not the other way around. The disdain for organized parties
seems to have taken roughly equal bites out of both the Democrats
and the Republicans. At the 2000 primary, Democrats comprised 39
percent of those registered. That figure is now down to close to
32 percent. And Republicans saw their share of registered voters
drop from 44 percent a decade ago to just 36 percent now. For
Arizona Public Radio this is Howard Fischer.