Fully 54% of Newly Registered NM Voters Are Neither Democrats Nor Republicans

What Does This Mean?

The Albuquerque Journal reports this morning that out of 43,434 voters who registered between March 31 2017 and August 31, 2018, 23,380 (53.8%) were neither Democrats nor Republicans.  Out of those who registered in the two traditional parties, Democrats nabbed 59% while Republicans got 41%.  What do we make of this?

At bottom, this speaks to the abject failure of the two political parties, either at the national or state level, to provide citizens what they want from government.  Democracy is failing, and people are beginning to rebel against a party system that contributes to its failure. Citizens want affordable health care, easy access to it, and controls over spiraling pharma costs.  They don't have it.  Americans want sensible gun control.  They don't have it.  Americans want better education.  Instead, the US keeps slipping down the international rankings on student performance and in New Mexico we slipped from 49th to 50th.  Americans want jobs with decent wages.  Instead, jobs with decent wages are disappearing.  These are non-partisan bread and butter issues, not frills, and the country can well afford them.

The primary system in place today is rigged because non-party members have no say in choosing the two candidates who are overwhelmingly likely to win the spot.  In effect, most newly registered New Mexicans are disenfranchised from having a say-so in this process.  There are many possible solutions:  allow any registered voter to vote in one primary election of their choosing.  This is what California did, with good results.  This would allow unaffiliated voters, say, to eliminate a pro-Trump Republican from winning a primary.  You could eliminate winner-take-all elections for Congress by allowing any political party winning, say, over 5% of the national vote to have seats in Congress proportional to its voting strength.  You could require a candidate to receive more than 50% of the vote in order to be elected through runoff elections or ranked voting systems.  Many other measures could reduce the likelihood that someone not wanted by the majority could get elected, something that routinely prevails today in violation of democratic fairness.

Many other ills plague American politics:  legalized bribery of public officials through campaign financing practices backed by activist Supreme Court judges, partisan polarization of Congress through the use of gerrymandering (a major contributor to the lack of civility in Congress), a monopolized news media subsidized almost exclusively by politically active, policy-driven mega-corporate interests, the bipartisan failure of government to enforce anti-monopoly laws, the bipartisan use of tax and other policies to redistribute income and wealth away from the middle class to the very wealthiest sectors of society.  Partisanship is only part of the problem

The result of all of this has been the rise of an aggressive crony-capitalist faction that, at the moment, appears bent on undermining the public respect for, and power of, key institutions like the FBI that legitimize democratic value of equal justice for all, and imposing an authoritarian, fear-driven political environment.  It will not be easy to undo these ills, which have been building steam for four decades.  But a major first step is to insist that we respect the right of voters to choose their preferred elected officials rather than to be forced into rigged political boxes that force growing numbers of people to choose between candidates they increasingly hesitate to be associated with.

New Mexico has not reached the pathetic levels of undemocratic governance we see in Washington, but it is getting there.  As I watched the debate between Michelle Lujan Grisham and Steve Pearce the other night I was struck by how much each candidate sounded like a well-rehearsed member of Congress, rattling off highly partisan talking points at a pace you couldn't keep up with.  Education?  Flip to talking points 3, 4, and 5, offer a statistic or two, vetted by national polls conducted by your political party.  The Republican answer was full of key words to appeal to conservatives (private education, charter schools), and the Democratic answer was permanent fund money for early childhood, something of a mantra among Democrats this year.  Nowhere in the debate or in the candidate web sites is there even remotely a goal such as catching up the the national student performance by, say 2035, or raising college readiness rates by 20 percent in ten years, etc.--the kinds of things educational experts believe are essential to any successful turnaround program

Most new voters in New Mexico show every evidence of being tired of the partisan games.  Leaders who hope to make a difference need to pay attention to what voters are saying with their feet about both parties.