On Tue, 21 Oct 2008, Jenny Brown wrote:
>>>I don't see why party ID is more important.
>>
>>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.... 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.
Your point is a solid one, but just for clarification, you're talking about party registration, and Kenworthy et al. are talking about party self-identification (i.e., in response to someone asking whether you consider yourself a Democrat, Republican or Independent). Which involves even bigger groups that are even squishier. But which FWIW do supposedly show these large-scale consistent trends and inflection points which they want to explain.
Michael