Independent Voices on Debt Debate

INDEPENDENT VOTERS

• Independent Voices in Debt Debate (Don Lemon, CNN) Joe Gandelman, Nicole Neily, and Omar H. Ali. "If President Obama wants to attract independent voters, he has to take a firm stance in favor of issues that will open up the political process. Right now we have 80% of Americans who are unhappy and don't trust the government and 9.8% unemployment--that's a crisis. There is a connection between the political process and the economy."  VIDEO
• Independents More Likely Than Others To Say The U.S. Is In Decline (Ricky Kreitner, Business Insider) 48% of non-affiliated voters said the U.S. is in decline… The most optimistic voters, it seems, are Democrats, blacks, and young people. Over half of respondents in each group said they believed America's best days were yet to come.
• The Hill Poll: One in 3 voters say the US has passed its peak (By Elise Viebeck, The Hill) Blacks and whites differed markedly on economic questions, with 78 percent of blacks saying their situations had either stayed the same or improved since Obama took office. Among whites, an overwhelming proportion (87 percent) said their situations had stayed the same or gotten worse.
• Pew survey analyzes Independent, Democratic, and Republican voter trends (by Christopher A. Guzman, CAIVN) Overall, partisan affiliation with the Democratic party has fallen from a quarter century high in 2008. From 1990 to 2011, Independents have grown steadily from 28% to 34%. This outpaces the percentage of Republicans, whose current identification of voters matches the 28% that Independents had a few times in the past eleven years.