>/ I don't see why party ID is more important. /
Michael wrote:
>Their reasons are (a) presidential votes are swayed a lot by who the candidates are, so introduce lots of noise into a sample >with a tiny N, and (b) the answer to the question of which party you identify with is pretty relevant for your political >identity.
It's something, but my sense is that it's tenuous. In Florida (OK, both semi-Southern and weird) we've been enduring Republican governors for a decade, and I don't think Democrats have had a majority in the legislature since 1996. Our voter rolls, at last count, have 4.7 million Democrats, 4.1 million Republicans, and 2.1 million something else. So there's a big squishy group outside the 2 parties, almost 20%, and the lead Democrats have over Republicans in registrations isn't, of late, reflected in the vote.
The other factor in Florida is that people are registered Democrat so they can vote in local primaries for city commissioner or sheriff, where those races are decided. Increasingly this is not so, but it's still a factor.
Jenny Brown