Nonbinary Voters
Don’t add insult to injury by forcing us to choose one of two parties at the polls and then accusing us of being closeted partisans when we exercise the rights you have allowed us.
This morning, I read a couple of articles that reminded me what it feels like to be forced into one of two boxes, when I have explicitly chosen neither. I got angry (again). Then I remembered that 1) I have a blog that could use some attention and 2) I have treated others the same way out of sheer ignorance. So maybe there is something to learn here.
Full disclosure first. I’m an old white guy who was raised by a Goldwater Republican in Louisiana. I’m slow but eventually catch on to most ideas with merit. I’m grateful to everyone who has been patient with me and try to return that favor by doing the same for others. That being said, I am also rather blunt. Please hear me out on yet another rant — this time drawing an unlikely comparison of gender and political identification.
My Liberation
I was an obedient child and voted as I was taught from the time I was old enough to vote (1975) until Ross Perot opened my eyes in his audacious 1992 campaign for President. I had never paid much attention to social issues but was (and remain to this day) a solid fiscal conservative. I saw the elder Bush as a sellout on taxes and was excited by the rebellious, straight talking Texan.
Like many voters, I assumed we had a two party system and was fine with that as long as I felt like I belonged to one of those parties. But because I had cast a vote for Perot, I was blamed for electing Bill Clinton. I stood up for my right to vote for the candidate of my choice and rejected outright the fantastic notion that my support for one candidate really meant support for another. This is where my real political education began.
I joined Perot’s grassroots organization, United We Stand America, in 1993 and became one of their leaders in the Wyoming chapter. I organized debates in the 1994 election season that led me to join the Libertarian Party (LP) and to run as their candidate for the U.S. House in 1998. I lost, of course, but moved to the Washington, DC area anyway, just a few months after the election. I abandoned the LP but in 2005 found a new political home with IndependentVoting.org (IV), a group of activists based in New York City (NYC) that had been working on election reforms for over a decade.
What I learned from my failed campaign was that third party challenges are dead on arrival. My new friends at IV knew that, too. They were building a movement of voters based on advocacy of our rights to full participation in the election process, regardless of party affiliation. In recent years, IV has been joined by dozens of other reform groups such as Open Primaries, Unite America, and the Forward Party.
As I mentioned at the outset, I’m slow. It was about a decade into my affiliation with IV that I learned from a board member why they had formed a Black/Independent alliance in the campaign to elect Mike Bloomberg as mayor of NYC. That puzzled me because they are different but not mutually exclusive categories.
Ironically, my (economics) dissertation, which was completed several years earlier, was about modeling the federal government as a complex adaptive system. All living systems, including, I had argued, human organizations, survive by forming loose connections between semi-autonomous agents. This would obviously include political parties and coalitions that cross party lines.
As separate entities, Blacks and Independents were powerlessness in NYC elections. Given the usual choice between major party candidates, the vast majority of both groups would vote for the Democrat, regardless. As IV President Jackie Salit describes in her book Independents Rising, Bloomberg won as a Republican who also ran on the Independence Party ticket after he agreed to work with the group toward nonpartisan reforms. This gave voice to Blacks and Independents who sought a real choice, and earned more respect for both groups among voters and politicians in NYC.
The moral of that story was clear — even to me. People do what they’ve gotta do. We don’t have to befriend or agree with someone on everything to do business with them. We win some and we lose some, but at least we enjoy the right to choose. We deserve the same right when it comes to voting — to say yes or no to any election or any candidate, and to choose differently as circumstances and options change. Our system is not like that; most of us live in states that limit our choices to those deemed safe for one or two political parties.
Independent = Neither
Fast forward to another very recent “aha” moment for me. I read a post here on Medium about frustration with the new protocol regarding use of preferred pronouns for transgender people. I commented on my own confusion about nonbinary people, then got schooled on the subject by someone much more knowledgeable than me. She told me nonbinary people don’t expect others to guess what they are but do feel very disrespected if they tell us how they want to be addressed and we ignore their request. That sounds fair to me. Less than a month later, a friend shared his life altering experience with a trans teenage child. He helped me understand that no one takes this lightly and that some just don’t strongly identify with either gender.
It occurred to me how hypocritical I was in expecting people to choose one gender or another just to fit into my neat habit of referring to him or her instead of (plural to me) them. I identify as an Independent voter and expect others to take my word for it. It’s insulting when they question my sincerity or intentions and insist that I really “lean” one way or another.
I joined the Forward Party last summer because their platform is all about election reform (nonpartisan primaries, ranked choice voting, and independent redistricting). Our slogan is “Not left. Not right. Forward.” The latest newsletter linked one article by the Pew Research Center and another by The New Republic. Both made me want to propose an addition to our slogan: “Not Leaning.”
Pew (and Gallup, for that matter), has built quite a following with their sophisticated surveys that produce data they can slice, dice, and display in myriad charts illustrating voters’ political preferences. Even as they acknowledge extreme polarization and dissatisfaction with the two party system, they continue to bake into their study categories that reinforce those forces: partisan leaners. It is not clear how these voters are identified, but since this particular study only had four categories (Republican, Lean Rep, Democrat, and Lean Dem), I assume they were not seeking opinions of voters who were unwilling to choose any of the categories being offered.
Likewise, but less surprisingly, the New Republic article parroted every story from either partisan camp about those of us who dare to think for ourselves about American politics; it suggests we’re insincere. It begins by the news from Gallup’s latest poll that the number of Independent voters now equals Democrats (D) and Republicans (R) combined — roughly half the electorate. I guess that makes us a vast conspiracy.
The evidence? We cast votes for members of one of the two parties. Never mind that thanks to election laws written by Ds and Rs, their candidates are the only ones on almost every ballot in the country in any election. This article tells our story as “shopping around” just so they can offer an alternative interpretation — that we’re driving the negative partisanship by expressing dissatisfaction with everything.
Wow. I think we can all imagine what would happen to a business with actual competition that blamed their customers when half of them expressed interest in shopping elsewhere.
The only true independents, according to the scholar cited in this article, are “just people who really don’t pay much attention to politics.”
Wow again. And the conclusion: that there are “no signs of disruption” of the century-old political duopoly. So much for the Gallup poll and all other evidence to the contrary.
This is more than disappointing. It’s disturbing that the largest presumably nonpartisan media and research organizations implicitly endorse the partisan duopoly and show no interest in what millions of us really think. My friends at IV don’t have the resources to compete with Gallup and Pew, but they care very much about what we mean when we say we’re Independent. To that end, they polled over 5000 of us a few years ago and produced this report. See for yourself that we do actually pay attention to politics.
For more contrast with the party lines, consider Unite America’s report on the effect of California’s 2010 Top Two primary reform. Instead of looking at everything in terms of the balance of power between two parties, this report analyzes the impact of the new voting method on polarization, voter participation, and electoral competition — indicators of the health of democracy that should matter to all of us.
I still know next to nothing about nonbinary gender identity, nor can I claim to have any comprehension of their experience. However, I know from my own experience that we have at least one thing in common. People whose only experience is binary, and especially those who are content with that experience, may not understand why others would reject that paradigm. Their own confusion, discomfort, and even fear of change can be manifested by insensitive and even demeaning reactions. Those of us who have not yet been seen or heard must keep our cool and stay the course. Time and justice are on our side.
