Independents' Day

It's fitting that the first senator to become an independent in more than thirty years hails from Vermont, the state with the most advanced independent politics in the nation. Vermont gave maverick Republican John McCain a solid victory in the 2000 presidential primary--nearly half those voting were self-described independents, and one in seven said that campaign finance reform was their top concern. The Vermont Progressive Party, which has tenaciously focused on the needs and interests of average people, is firmly entrenched in Burlington, the state's largest city, and its gubernatorial candidate, Anthony Pollina, got 10 percent of the vote last year in a hard-fought three-way race.

Thus, Senator Jim Jeffords's decision was helped enormously by the political space for an independent path that had already been created back home and by the steady pressure from the state's Progressives, which kept the local center of gravity far to the left of the Bush-Gore mainstream. Says Pollina, "Jeffords is a smart politician, and he recognizes that Vermonters are really fed up with politics-as-usual, big-money-driven, major-party politics." Indeed, two-thirds of Vermonters polled said they approved of Jeffords's move, and his approval rating topped President Bush's by almost twenty-five points.

The question of the moment is whether more independents are about to come out of the Senate cloakroom. Conditions for such surprises are favorable and getting more so by the year. Since 1990 we've seen a remarkable proliferation of these free birds. Not only has Vermont's Representative Bernie Sanders become a Congressional institution, independents and third-party candidates have been elected governor in four states--Maine, Alaska, Connecticut and, most spectacularly, in Minnesota. After Ross Perot got nearly 20 million votes in 1992 as an independent, press speculation about the possibility of other maverick candidacies has become a fixture of pre-primary presidential coverage. Recall the fuss over Colin Powell in the fall of 1995 and the hyperventilating over Jesse Ventura, Warren Beatty, Donald Trump et al. in the fall of 1999. There's a market for outside-the-box politics, and demand is rising while supply is tight.

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