More voters in Mass choosing not to affiliate with political party

Voters go to the polls Tuesday to help pick their party nominees for president at a time when interest in partisan politics is at an all-time low, even within the state’s dominant Democratic Party.

Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin said enrollment in both the Democratic and Republican parties is in a downward spiral.

Two-thirds of Massachusetts voters are now unenrolled, the official moniker for independents.

Democrats occupy all the major offices in the state, but it’s shedding voters.

Galvin said enrollment in the party is now down to 27 percent, according to the most recent numbers.

Enrollment was hovering above the 30 percent range the past several years and was above 40 percent in the 1980s when Michael Dukakis was governor, he said.

The situation is even worse for the Republic Party in Massachusetts as it represents only 8 percent of voters, but it has been below 12 percent for many years.

“People are moving away from party politics,” the secretary, a Democrat, said.

The Massachusetts primary is only one of 15 across the nation Tuesday in what has been nicknamed Super Tuesday because of the bounty of convention delegates up for grab.

The 15 states include California and Texas, which have the largest amounts of conventional delegates at stake.

The two dominant front-runners for the major party nominees are President Joe Biden for the Democrats and former President Donald Trump on the GOP side.

Public opinion polls show both men are fairly unpopular, but they face only token opposition.

Galvin said there might also be something of a protest vote developing.

He said 13,000 Democrats have switched to unenrolled, or independent, for this election. That makes them eligible to vote in either primary.

Galvin said his opinion is that many of those former Democrats want to vote in the Republic Primary for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley as a protest against Trump.

Another development Galvin said he has noticed is that people voting in the Republican primary have come to embrace mail-in voting. More that 130,000 mail-in ballots were requested on the GOP side.

Trump used to discourage mail-in voting, claiming it was susceptible to fraud.

Although neither Biden or Trump are popular with the majority of voters in the polls, and there is little competition, local election officials say they anticipate a solid turnout.

Robert Cutler, the town clerk in Foxboro, said presidential primaries usually draw 40 to 50 percent of voters and he expects this year’s turnout to be about the same — probably closer to the 41 percent level of four years ago.

Mail-in voting is one sign of interest in an election and Cutler said it was solid in Foxboro.

He said about 2,000 ballots were cast by mail in Foxboro but walk-in early voting was slow with only 17 people on Wednesday, the opening day for early voting.

Cutler and other local election officials said postcards concerning voting by mail were sent out by the state and that may have contributed to people voting by that method.

Sharon Fortune, election office manager in Attleboro, said her office received 4,337 votes by mail.

She had 186 walk-in early voters on Wednesday and 430 Friday.

In North Attleboro, election coordinator Patrician Dolan said her town also had a lot of mail-in votes. About 3,500 of the town’s 23,387 voters mailed in their ballots, showing a fair amount of interest.

“A lot of people are interested,” she said.