A Blooomberg article from July 9 2012 called “Independent voter surge cuts Democrats’ swing state edge” says: “Independent voters are growing in numbers at the expense of Democrats in battleground states most likely to determine this year’s presidential election, a Bloomberg News analysis shows.”
Independents grew by 443,000 in CO,FL,IA,NV,NH,NC. Dems dropped 480,000 and Reps added 38,000. Ohio stats aren’t mentioned but it’s not inconceivable that they could show a similar pattern, that is, independents “unaffiliated” have fled the Democrats. They obviously aren’t lock-step with the Democrats anymore. They are now the sought-after indies that history shows split for the challenger time and again.
I had seen on another thread that OH doesn’t have party registration quite like some other states do — Party ID is determined by which primary the voter voted in.
That must not be entirely true. One unaffiliated voter in OH-3 did vote in the 2012 D primary. Another 2832 voted in the unaffiliated primary - I didn’t realize there was such a thing. The remaining 373706 did not vote in the 2012 primary.
Go back to 2010, and we see that 162 of these unaffiliated voters voted in the Constitution Party primary. 20079 voted in the D primary, 79 in the Green, 386 Libertarian, 9698 in the R primary, 44 Socialist, and 9000 in the unaffiliated primary. The remaining 337091 did not vote in the 2010 primary.
The 2008 breakdown:
162 C: [31D, 28R, 14U, 89DNV]
20079 D: [13383D, 200R, 1012U, 4894DNV]
79 G: [31 D, 2R, 8U, 38DNV]
386 L: [104 D, 52R, 23U, 207DNV]
9698 R: [1077 D, 4286 R, 378U, 3957DNV]
44 S: [7D, 2R, 1U, 34DNV]
9000 U: [2229D, 564R, 1583U, 4624DNV]
337091 DNV: [52857D, 6739R, 10048U, 267447DNV]