Three Doors, One Story About American Politics

After two months of canvassing, three voter patterns keep emerging at doors. They're not unrelated. They're connected by the same broken system. And the…

Last week I knocked on a door in my district. The voter opened, looked at my palm card, and asked the first question Independent candidates hear most often anywhere in the country: "What party are you with?" When I said Independent, the natural follow up came: "Do you lean Democrat or Republican?" I told her I lean toward fixing things that are broken regardless of which party broke them. She nodded politely. Then came the proxy round. "What do you think of the governor?" "What do you think of the president?" The conversation never got to the school funding question she'd mentioned in passing, or the property tax issue that had brought me to her street in the first place. I've had some version of that conversation hundreds of times in the past two months. There are three doors I keep encountering, and the patterns at those doors say something important about American politics right now. Worth writing down. Door one: the party filter The most common pattern is the party first filter. A voter opens, sees my Independent label, and starts probing for partisan signals. The questions about the governor and the president aren't really questions about me. They're questions designed to figure out my party by asking me to take sides on partisan figures. If I dodge the proxy questions, the conversation cools. If I answer them, the voter has placed me on their political map and the substantive conversation we should have been having about local issues never happens. Either way, the actual job of evaluating me as a candidate gets skipped. I don't blame the voter for this. Party affiliation is a real signal, and voters have limited time. The trouble is that the system has trained voters to treat the party label as the only thing worth knowing, even for candidates who don't fit either…