Independent voters giving parties heartburn in 2016 primaries

DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and RNC Chair Reince Priebus

In a traditional campaign season, independents serve as the middle ground, the moderate forces within the electorate that tend to dispatch candidates who swing too far left or right.

But in the highly non-traditional campaign of 2016, two independent candidates – Sen. Bernie Sanders and, arguably, Donald Trump – have enjoyed far more success than was ever imagined six months ago. Matthew Dowd, chief political analyst for ABC News, points out Sanders and Trump display very little party allegiance yet they have generated the most energy in their respective campaigns for presidential nominee.

Sanders, a left-winger with no appetite for centrist politics, has served throughout his time in Congress as an Independent who caucused with the Democrats. As a presidential candidate, he has distanced himself far from the Democratic Party establishment.    

Trump has switched parties five times, according to Dowd. He has been a Republican, a Democrat, and an independent. In the current campaign, he says he’s a Republican. But in practice he is an outsider, an independent, taking on the system in his own inimitable way.

In a column written for the Wall Street Journal, Dowd, who was a top campaign aide to George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, makes the case that the havoc created for the establishment by Sanders and Trump demonstrates “the broken nature of thetwo political parties and the depth of the desire for change from the status quo.”

Here’s more from Dowd:

“A majority of Americans are frustrated at our current political system and the duopoly of our parties, and the fastest-growing segment of voters is people registering as independents. Yet many commentators still argue that all voters predominantly choose between the two parties and that there is no room for independent candidates. The much-discussed anger among voters -- of all stripes -- stems in part from feeling made to choose between two unsatisfactory options, with no real alternatives. For years, with each election, voters seem to throw one party out to try the other and see if it works differently. So far, nothing has really changed.

“… The power of independents across the United States … cannot be underestimated. And Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump have put an exclamation point on the weakness of the two incumbent parties. The evolution of the 2016 election has shown that the two major parties are going to have to deal with the disruption independents are forcing on the system.”