One thing this election will do: Grow more Independents.

[Wounded Bear]

5. My anecdotal, personal experience is that independents...

are mostly disaffected Repubs and/or libertarians who tend to vote 'conservatively' anyway. And by 'conservative' I of course mean Republican.

Not many independents in my small circle are truly center-left, probably because the Democratic party has drifted so far to the right trying to attract the center-right part of the electorate. I guess where I'm going is that I think there may be a movement to the left in the independent part of the electorate. At least I hope so. It's been shown for years that most Americans actually are nowhere near as conservative as many pundits like to say. Case in point: Obamacare, in which most people 'opposed' it when presented as a total program, but most people supported every major part of it by wide margins when asked separately.

One major part of our Republic is that the way things are set up, the minority can drive things to a large degree if the true majority is asleep or blocked in some way.