The #1 key to the Democratic candidate winning in November is...

[ContinentalOp]

63. You're making a lot of assumptions.

Is the number of registered Democrats today actually lower, or simply the percentage of the total? You're ignoring the fact that in between 2008 and today, the tea party emerged and swelled the ranks of "independent" registered voters with right wing crazies.

Also it's less important imo to look at the total percentage of registered independents vs democrats and more important to look at how many of them actually voted in the last presidential election. In 2012, 29% of voters were registered independents, and 50% of them voted for Romney, only 45% for Obama, and only 5% were third party voters. 38% of voters were democrats, and 92% of them voted for Obama, 7% for Romney, 1% for "other."

So the 45% of indies who voted for Obama only represented 13% of the total electorate in 2012 (45% of 29%). That's a much smaller coalition than people of color or women, let alone registered Democrats.

And don't you think that a large percentage of the independents who voted for Obama in his second term will vote for a member of Obama's cabinet and essentially a continuation of the Obama administration? If they were so disillusioned with Obama and the party they probably wouldn't have voted for his second term. And that was against a pretty milquetoast republican candidate. Fear of Trump is going to turn out left leaning indies far more than opposition to Romney did.

If there is in fact a huge new groundswell of left leaning independent voters who weren't registered as indies in 2012 it probably comes mostly from newly registered young people. That's not to say that they're not important, that they're ideas aren't great, or that we don't need or want them in the party, but at worst they're going to stay home. They're most likely not going to vote for Trump. And again, looking at 2012, the 18-30 demographic was only 19% of the electorate and they went 60-40 for Obama. So young people for Obama were only 11.4% of the electorate.