In other words...sitting on the fence...I don't see the "Independents" becoming a major political party in my lifetime...and I'm 41....so as of now..Independents are just spoilers...where were the Independents in the '00 and '04 elections??..voting for Nader???...sheesh...come on..
Only to someone with a naieve view of politics who insists everyone play for one team or the other. Well, politics is an individual issue. There is no fence. And it is not just another team sport. Everyone goes into the polling booth alone. And when someone disagrees with major points of a political party's platform, trying to force them to suppress their beliefs and stuff them into one of your party pigeonholes just because you want people divided into nice, neat little teams only pisses them off and sends them the opther way.
And as to "Independents" being a political party? You just don't get it. By definition, they have no party. And more and more these days, they are deciding elections, particularly on the local level. I've worked the phones in the last two major elections, and we lost not based on the republican party platform, but based simply on how many registered republicans we could get off their lazy butts to actually bother to vote and how many independents we could persuade to vote republican because they more strongly disagreed with the democrats. Just because independents haven't joined the republicans or the democrats doesn't mean they don't vote for republicans or democrats.
The last gubernatorial election here in Oregon was a perfect example. Quite frankly, we got our butts kicked, not by the democrats, but by the libertarians. The libertarians managed to attract the vast majority of the independent voters because they actually fought the state legislature's forced tax increase and proposed a conservative and sane budget. At the same time, I'm ashamed to say, the local republican leadership did nothing about the tax increase, and proposed a state budget that was identical to the democrat's. So the libertarians got the independent vote, and we aren't in the governor's mansion. And this will happen again so long as republican cheerleader twits keep dismissing the independent voters simply because they refuse to join the republican "team".