Orlando resident Debbie Smith has been an independent voter for 45 years — ever since she registered to vote while attending college in Missouri. By now, she’s weary of the media and the pollsters for ignoring voters like herself because she’s registered with a no-party-affiliation, or NPA.
“As a lifelong NPA, I watch these programs on TV and they just sit there and they just talk about Democrats and Republicans and completely forget that in this state [nearly] 30% aren’t one or the other and then nationally I think it’s even higher,” she says. “So for the media to completely ignore and all the pollsters that much of the voting population to me just says we’re entrenched in a system that’s not set in reality.”
Smith’s comments come at a time when the Florida political world remains fixated on the continuing rise of registered Republicans over Democrats, a trend that began years ago.
As of June 30, 2023, the Republican Party of Florida had posted 5,263,269 active registered voters compared to 4,721,471 for the Democratic Party. The GOP lead was 541,798, according to voter registration data from the Florida Division of Elections.
Meanwhile, NPA voters posted a whopping 3,911,131, according to the data, and an additional 286,493 registered voters aligned with the 13 recognized third parties in the state, such as the Green, Libertarian and Reform parties. The combination of NPA and third-party registered voters now make up nearly 29.6% of the Florida electorate as of June 30, 2023.
Overall, the GOP percentage is at 37.1%; and the Democrats, 33.3%.
Outnumbering Rs and Ds
Nationally, the trend for voters to disassociate themselves with either the Republican or Democratic parties has never been stronger. A Gallup poll reported in January that a record 41% of Americans called themselves independent voters, outnumbering Republican and Democratic identifiers, both of which had 28% of voters.
There are 15 counties in Florida where the NPA category lists second in terms of voter registrations. In twelve of those counties (Bay, Charlotte, Citrus, Collier, Lake, Lee, Martin, Nassau, Okaloosa, Pasco, Santa Rosa and St. Johns), there are more NPAs than Democrats, while in Broward, Miami-Dade and Orange, there are more NPA voters than Republicans.
“I just think people are fed up,” says Steve Hough, a noted political independent from the Panhandle who for years has fought against the state’s closed primary system, which prevents NPA voters in Florida from participating in primary elections. “I just believe the parties have lost their credibility in a sense that they spout off during their campaigns about how bad the other party is and I think people have many views and issues that cross those party lines.”
Kipp Frolich, 66, has been a Republican, a Democrat and now an NPA voter over the past few decades. He says he’s “discouraged about the polarization between the two parties.”
“It seems to me that many people – if you ask them – they say something to the effect, ‘I vote for the person, I don’t vote for the party.’ I have many friends who might say something like that, but in most cases I think it’s bull. It’s kind of the thing to say, you’re for whoever the best candidate is, I believe just talking to friends and folks you run into while people might say that, they tend to vote mostly along party lines.”
Michael Binder, a professor of political science at the University of North Florida, says that more than half of registered non-party-affiliated voters are “closeted partisans,” who support one of the two major parties but just don’t want to be labeled as such. He also says that they don’t show up at the polls at the same level of Democrats and Republicans.
“At the end of the day, NPAs don’t get much more than 20% of the electorate during presidential elections – it’s even smaller for midterms and off-year elections,” he says.
An independent to win?
NPA candidates run every election year up and down the state without much if any electoral success – but some remain hopeful.
“Florida…is ripe for an independent to win a race,” maintains Fort Lauderdale resident Kip Gibson, who ran as an NPA for governor in 2018 and lieutenant governor in 2022.
But history doesn’t back that notion up. When then-governor Charlie Crist ditched the GOP to become an NPA candidate in 2010 — after it became apparent that he was going to lose the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate — he ended up losing by 19 points in the general election, though he did garner more votes than Democratic nominee Kendrick Meek. (The winner in that 2010 U.S. Senate race was Republican Marco Rubio.)
While NPA voters have increased their proportion of the overall electorate over the years (there were less than 10% registered NPA voters in Florida 30 years ago), Susan MacManus, professor emerita of political science at the University of South Florida, says the increase has been most prominent over the past decade.
“I think we’ve seen a spurt in the last decade because it’s a better-known option,” she says. “If you look at someone who initially registers that way, there’s a lot of reasons but some just don’t like the two-party system, some like the multi-party system. Some register as independents and this is what we heard in college and high school – an independent is an independent thinker and more rational. And so you have some people whose philosophy is okay, I’m registering as NPA because I want to be known as an independent and then you’ve got those out there that for one reason or another have lost faith.”
There’s also the fact that the public just seems wearier of limiting themselves to only two choices. The Pew Research Center found last year that more than a quarter of Americans (27%) said that they have an unfavorable opinion of both major political parties. That’s up from just 6% who felt that way in 1994.
MacManus also believes that more people in the business community are more apt to want to appear nonpartisan in these rancorous political times.
Third parties in Florida
That’s part of the complicated calculus about why Tampa entrepreneur Roberto Torres proudly remains an NPA voter.
He says that while his voting record leans more Democratic than Republican, he likes having the option of choosing who he believes is the best person for the job. “[Hillsborough County Sheriff] Chad Chronister is a Republican, but he does a great job, so he gets my vote,” he says.
Torres says that in his native Panama (as in many countries around the world) multiple political parties must work with each other to form coalitions to get voting majorities.
When it comes to third parties in Florida, Torres says he has hopes for the new Forward Party, the third-party vehicle created by former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. “I think that he has a really legitimate shot at trying to shock the system a little bit with the Forward Party. Some people don’t give them credit, or say they’re not serious, but you have to start somewhere.”
That somewhere is in Seminole County, where Brian Beute, a lifelong Republican, announced on June 1 that he would be running for the supervisor of elections in 2024 as a Forward Party member, becoming the first registered candidate in Florida to file under that party name. “I find it appealing,” he says. “The Forward Party movement you might even say is based upon filling the void and identifying that there really is a void in American politics, a bottom-up movement.”
In May, Jordan Marlowe, who has served as the mayor of Newberry in Alachua County for the past six years, announced that he was leaving the Libertarian Party and joining the Forward Party.
On their website, the Forward Party is vague in laying out its ideology, instead referring to how it will “advance realistic, sensible solutions that move us forward and past the extremes.”
Beute says that ideally, he would be running as an NPA and not as a member of any party. “I decided to choose the Forward Party because in essence, philosophically it is a party of independence,” he says. “It is a party that I can envision in the next twenty years really challenging the status quo of a two-party system.”
Lifelong independent voter Debbie Smith says that while the premise of the Forward Party gives her hope, she’s not about to leave her independent voter status, even for an alternative to the two-party system.
“I’ve been an NPA my whole life, so I’m not the type to jump on the board of a new party,” she says. “I’m just not a joiner that way. I just think we need better candidates and a better system, not just more parties. But that’s just me.”
This article originally appeared in florida phoenix