Jan Brewer

Arizona voters are turning their backs to the state’s three recognized political parties in greater numbers than ever before. New voters are registering as independents at more than twice the rate Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians combined.

Overall, nearly 35,400 new voters registered during the third quarter of the year. Here’s the Arizona Secretary of State’s breakdown of their party preferences:

Independent – 58.6 percent

Democrat – 33 percent

Republican – 8.5 percent

Libertarian – negative less than 1 percent – meaning fewer Libertarians joined the ranks of new voters than existing Libertarian voters were purged from voter rolls.

Secretary of State Jan Brewer expects the voters registering as Dems, Reps and Libs will surge shortly. “As we get closer to the presidential preference elections in 2008 where only those voters registered with a specific political party can participate, I have no doubt that we will see party registration significantly climb,” she said in a press release.

“I feel confident that the voter outreach efforts of my office, the county recorders, the political parties, and the candidates themselves will also lead to voter interest as we get closer to the 2008 election cycle,” she said.

So far though, just the opposite is happening. Nearly 39,800 new voters registered during the second quarter. Here’s the breakdown of how they registered:

Independent – 53 percent

Democrat – 36 percent

Republican – 11 percent

Libertarian – less than 1 percent

So for the third quarter, the numbers showed a decrease of about 3 percentage points for Democrats, a drop of 2½ percent for Republicans and decrease of 1 percentage point for Libertarians. Yet voters who registered as “none of the above” increased more than 5½ percentage points.

The trend seems to indicate that new voters are more interested in staying outside of the parties than they are in voting in the parties’ presidential preference elections. The Arizona presidential preference election is set for Feb. 5, so the fourth quarter voter registration results should tell the true story.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Surveys, polls and guesses, The donkeys, The elephants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.