Of all 50 states, one surprisingly far surpasses the others in the percentage of registered independent voters: Massachusetts.
In Massachusetts, a typically Democratic-leaning state, 62% of all registered voters are independents as of November 2023, outnumbering both major political parties. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 3-1 ratio; nearly 30% of voters are registered Democrats and just 9% are Republicans.
“We have a lot of very liberal people, but the voters statewide are not as, you know, they’re not lefty, lefties the way some magazines make it out to be. You can win statewide if you’re a moderate Republican in Massachusetts,” Ray La Raja, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-director of the UMass Amherst Poll, told the Washington Examiner.
So why does Massachusetts, a state that has Democratic supermajorities in both of its legislative chambers and is not a swing state, have so many independents? Semi-open primaries and newly instated automatic voter registration may be the answer.
According to Steve Koczela, president of MassINC Polling Group, automatic voter registration, which was adopted in 2018, registers Massachusetts residents to vote at various points of contact with the state government, notably at the Department of Motor Vehicles. There, those of age are automatically registered with an “unenrolled” party or independents. If people want to pick a party, they must go to a party website or in person to an office to register for their party of choice.
The extra step creates more work that some may not be inclined to do since Massachusetts has semi-open primaries, meaning voters do not have to be registered in a specific party.
“There’s no penalty for being an independent. In fact, there’s a benefit, because you can vote either primary and vice versa,” La Raja said.
Because of the shift toward AVR, Massachusetts independents are now leaning more left than they typically do. This isn’t necessarily a change in independents’ attitudes, more so that there are more of them now while the margins for Democratic office winners have stayed similar.
“It used to be essentially that Republicans almost always would win the unenrolled voters,” Koczela told the Washington Examiner. “But now that there’s so few people enrolled in either party, it is that there are more Democrats entering on a broad category or more Democratic-leaning voters entering that unenrolled category.”
Massachusetts’s Democratic nature is still present despite the independent majority.
“Now, Massachusetts, politically it has not moved at all to the right, you know, no decrease in Democratic sentiment,” Koczela said. “In Massachusetts, it’s just the mechanics of registering to vote that have caused a huge increase in unenrolled voters.”
Democrats hold supermajorities in both the Massachusetts House, 135-24, and the Senate, 36-4. The current governor, Maura Healey, is a Democrat, but Massachusetts has a long history of Republican governors, including former Govs. Charlie Baker and Mitt Romney, which some believe could be aided by the high numbers of independents and the state’s center-left voting history.
Republicans have held on to the office of the governor for most of the last three decades, even as progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) proved victorious in congressional races.
“We are open to Republican managers and Democratic activists for Congress,” David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, told the Boston Globe. “Underneath that umbrella of 60%, there’s a method to the madness.”
So, Massachusetts independents may not truly be independents at all, based on voting record, and may merely be a statistic of convenience. Still, Massachusetts may be more in the center than believed, as independents oftentimes are.
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“We do vote for a lot of Democrats, but a lot of the Democrats who we vote for here aren’t super liberal. The policy that comes out of them is often quite, sort of center to center-left,” Koczela said.
“Reading the politics of being super lefty, I think, is wrong. I think that [being center-left] has more to do with why we’ve ended up with these Republican governors rather than independents. Because if it were independents, then you’d have people who would be more willing to look at Republican members of Congress and we haven’t had one of those decades,” Koczela continued.