Independents Incoming!

An interview with Lura Forcum, president of the Independent Center

Photo by Ernie Journeys on Unsplash

To give everyone a break from non-stop exposure to my brain, I’m hoping to start interviewing people who are broadly aligned with the radically moderate project I’m working on here.

You can either read this lightly edited interview or listen via the Substack podcast on your commute. Convenient!

But first, a quick introduction of our guest:

Lura Forcum is president of the Independent Center. She has a PhD in marketing with a focus on social cognition and brands. In her many lives, she’s been on the faculty at Clemson University, served as Director of Marketing Communications at the State Policy Network, and since 2024 has led The Independent Center as its president. As Lura describes it, the Independent Center is “the go-to organization for information, research, and engagement with independent voters, who now make up the plurality of the electorate. We represent those who are fed up with partisan politics and feel politically homeless. We believe the future is not red or blue; it's fiscally responsible, socially tolerant, and free to choose the best options for ourselves, our families, and our communities.”

Lauren: Welcome! This is a bit of an experiment. We're going to be trying out some short [not so short, as it turns out] interviews with people who are aligned with the overall project of radical moderation in sometimes obvious and sometimes not obvious ways. Today we have with us Lura Forcum, who is president of the Independent Center and has done work in the policy space for a long time.

She has some really exciting insights into what ails us in our current deeply polarized and deeply politicized time. Lura, to kick us off, can you just give us a broad overview of the the Independent Center, what your goals are, and then what you are really hoping this space can become?

Lura: Thanks! The Independent Center is a really new organization. We've been around for about a year and I've been leading it since December, so I'm also new. And what we do is talk to and listen to and research political independents and we're building this audience of people who are just looking at the political landscape in the United States and saying, we'd like to be involved. We'd like to engage politically, but neither party feels like home to us. We just don't like either one.

I'm a pretty true independent myself. I don't have a political party. And one of the things I noticed it can feel a little bit like you are lacking a community if you don't, if you're not part of a party, right?

Because it's “what are you?” That's what everybody wants to know. And if you're an independent, you're just saying I'm neither. We’re trying to create this sense of identity or movement where people feel like, no this isn't the absence of party. This is a specific identity.

I'm independent minded, right? Which just means that I wanna see policy that works rather than the policy of a particular party succeed. And, we tell people all the time you don't have to vote for a third party or independent candidate to call yourself an independent. The thing that we think is so valuable and important about these voters is that they swing vote and they split ticket vote.

So they actually add a lot of accountability politically because you can't just count on your base and, increasingly voters are identifying as independent. And we think that this is so positive for politics overall, because it means that you actually have to show that what you're doing is making people's lives better in order to win their vote.

And if it's just partisan, you have your base and they support you by and large, no matter what you do. And I think that kind of really deep partisanship is actually really bad for democracy.

Lauren: Yeah, there's this really interesting misconception. I recently called myself politically homeless on another interview.

And I really feel that way deeply. I feel unrepresented by any of the political conversations that are going on, but that doesn't mean that I'm apolitical and I think sometimes we confuse those two things, right? I'm deeply political. I'm a political scientist.

You are a policy person and social scientist. You can be deeply political and deeply policy oriented and still feel homeless - and in fact I suspect that sometimes the people who are the most deeply political and policy oriented feel the most homeless in that sense.

Lura: Because there's nuance in your thinking and your position that's just not represented in the political discourse.

I feel the same way. I'm also a political junkie. And what I love is not the politics personal part of it, it's not the figures doing politics. I love good public policy. It makes people's lives better. bad policy makes people's lives worse.

And sometimes in really unjust ways that are invisible to the rest of us. And the idea that there's a process where we could rank our values and come to a shared view of what's important and what the role of government should be in our lives. The idea that we have a process for answering that question to me is really hopeful and positive and exciting.

And I want more people engaged in that process because I think that's how we get good policy that represents our values.

Lauren: Absolutely. I write about radical moderation on this Substack and you connect with independent voters. Moderation and independence obviously are not synonyms because you can have lots of independent voters with extreme positions.

But what connections do you see between the two projects?

Lura: I think there are two that really come to mind. And one of them is rejecting this notion of partisanship. Partisanship can be a healthy tension, but in recent years for a number of different reasons, having to do with media and social media we've gotten to a place where it's not healthy partisanship. One of the areas where we agree is that if you look at politics as “my side needs to win in order for me to feel represented and heard” that's a major problem for democracy. The other thing is that I suspect both of us look at our work as being oriented around relationships. And I was thinking about Mark Granovetter's work about the strength of weak ties and relationships. Because I know when you say relationships people think you mean these really close family, friendship, significant others, those kind of relationships. And those are important, but Granovetter's work about weak ties says that no, all of these things are relationships. We have relationships within our community, right? Within the city, the county, the state, and those matter too for how we live our lives.

And so part of what independents are saying is we need government that prioritizes our ability to find commonality and make government work rather than be in just pitted trench warfare with the other side.

Lauren: I talk a lot about zero sum versus non zero sum thinking and I'm obviously not at all the first person to think about it that way.

But it does seem to me that politics now is really deeply zero sum, which relates to your point. It's about winning. It's about lobbing stuff into the trenches of the other side. I was just reading an opinion piece in the New York Times where one of the opinion columnists was criticizing Gavin Newsom for having these podcast conversations with people on the right.

And at one point, the author actually uses the term "enemies" and I was like, this is exactly the problem, right? And I haven't listened to Newsom's podcast, so I don't actually know if it's good or not.

But the broader point that we're bringing out here is that good public policy isn't about winning. And it's not about your side sort of getting some sort of score. It's about fixing problems. It's about addressing the needs of the people who live in our shared spaces. And so that distinction is is really important, right? The focus on solutions as opposed to keeping score or scoring off the other side.

Lura: Yeah, none of those things make sense for democracy. I love the zero sum framing. It's a really helpful way like when you apply that lens that can show some places where politics is really breaking down and being destructive. One of the ways, one of the frames that I bring is that I'm a consumer psychologist, my training heavily emphasizes social psychology. One of the things that's really useful to people looking at our political landscape right now is the idea of in-groups and out-groups. Your in-group is people like your family, your community, your church, your sports team, right?

Those people feel like you, and there's an enormous body of research that talks about how people share resources and trust and work with people who are in-group members versus out-group members.

Out-group members play less of a role in modern society than they probably did over historical time where, you would have had warring tribes. And maybe this is why this idea is less obvious to people in their daily lives, but we need this concept to understand politics right now, because out-groups are who you would have fought from, taken from, warred with over evolutionary time, right? And so now your out-group is maybe like the other you know, people from a rival country, right?

The problem right now is that we are talking about the other side politically as an out-group. And what I want people to understand is all the tendencies that go along with treating the other party as out-groups: It's okay to mistreat them. It's okay to take from them. They are really literally the enemy. And so they don't deserve fair treatment. They don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

And this is not how democracy is meant to work. These are our fellow citizens. And if everybody is on board with this out-group way of looking at the other side, we really can't have consensus and governing.

And there's no reason why we should look at fellow citizens as out-group members, especially when I have research that shows just how much we agree on most policy issues. It's stunning the level of vitriol and opposition in our discourse compared to when you measure people's actual views, how close together they are.

Lauren: You can probably speak more much more coherently than I can about this, but this is one of the concerns about the growing rate of affective polarization. It's no longer that I might disagree with a Democrat or a Republican on something. I now think they're a bad person for having those beliefs, right?

And that's a huge shift. That's the real toxicity there. And that's that in-group, out-group piece.

Lura: Yes, absolutely. I have some research that I did with my colleague Erin Norman called Beyond Polarization. And what we did was measure these three core areas of how you perceive the world and relate to the world.

And one is your feeling of access to resources. The other category is your feeling of connection socially and to a community. And then the last thing is how you perceive harm and morality. These are the founding pillars of how we relate to the world.

These are the key things that drive most of our perception over historical time. For a long time, because parties are a modern invention. And so we measured these three things, and we didn't ask people about their party identification until the very end of the survey so we could avoid priming.

And then we used a statistical technique that allows groups to emerge out of the data rather than forcing a model. And our thinking was: if the parties represent two groups of people with really distinct opposing values, then that ought to emerge naturally from the data, right?

You ought to see maybe not just two groups, but four groups that roughly approximate the two parties. That's not what we saw at all. We saw one partisan group. We saw six groups that are almost evenly split across political party. And what that tells me is that parties are not made up of people with two diverging, opposed sets of values and ways of looking at the world.

And if that's true, then why are we talking about “the other side”? And, you hear it all the time in political discourse, right? Oh, they hate America. They hate democracy. They hate this country. And this is insane. No, actually their values are probably quite similar to yours on most policy issues.

So why are we talking about each other like this?

Lauren: Just a few weeks ago, the Independent Center released a nationwide survey of voters. Can you talk a little bit about just what some of the trends you're seeing in independent voters? Are there particular policy issues that are motivating them?

Why do you think there's growing numbers of them these days?

Lura: Sure. The Independent Center, one of the things that sets us apart from a lot of policy organizations is that we do a lot of bottom up work rather than talking to our audience and saying: “here's the answer on a policy”. We say "you tell us what is important to you, and we'll tell you how policies relate to those values." And then you decide, right?

I'm not here to tell you what to think. That's why we do focus groups and polling and talk so much to these voters. And we did a poll just prior to the Trump inauguration because we wanted to be able to compare over time how do people think this administration is doing.

So we measured the views of not just independents, but also Republicans and Democrats. And I'll tell you two things that I found really striking from these results.

One of the questions we asked was, “would you like to see Donald Trump succeed or fail at working across the aisle to enact bipartisan policies?” And this is just really fascinating to me: even Democrats want to see him succeed through bipartisanship. It's 48 percent of Democrats, 62 percent of independents, and 85 percent of Republicans.

And so to me, this says that people - even within his party - people want to see him working with the other side. We asked the same question for Congress, and the numbers are roughly the same. And to me, I'm like, wow, there's so much support for bipartisanship among individual voters. Why are elected officials not getting the memo?

I don't think bipartisanship is something that Trump is considering. I also don't see Congress moving in that direction either. And I'm curious about the disconnect there. Because our data is really decisive that people want to see bipartisanship.

Lauren: One thing that frustrates me so much about the lack of bipartisanship and the growing zero sum thinking and binary thinking that people are falling into is that it allows us to ignore the really important problems that we're facing. We attack issues like immigration or homelessness from these purely partisan lines.

Which means that we're talking past each other and we're also not actually focused on solution finding. What are you hearing from independent voters? How are independents thinking about what did they see as the most serious policy issues and how are you as the Independent Center, but also maybe independent voters broadly, thinking about some of these solutions?

Lura: Independents care a lot about affordability and inflation. And in that regard, they're really not different from the rest of the electorate.

One of the things that is really top of mind for independents in particular is the need for health care reform. And I'm by no means an expert in health care policy, but one of the things that comes up with health care reform is the fact that it's tied to employment. Our labor force is less mobile than it could be because of the way that health care is connected to employment.

And then additionally, the lack of price transparency in health care. We are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of putting prices on people's ability to be healthy. If we're thinking about economic terms like utility, obviously, there are issues if we are super transactional and money oriented around health care, but on the other hand, excluding price considerations entirely from health care is not leading to efficient decision making.

It's hard to say where you would start to introduce reforms, but I think a conversation like, what can we do to improve health care that isn't just Obamacare is either the answer or the worst thing in the world. We could start that conversation. And having some more flexibility around your ability to get health care would be another really helpful thing.

Bringing more market forces into health care is something that's possible and could really improve the quality of health care in a way that making it all paid by the government might not.

Additionally, I would say, most Americans - and I don't have data on this - but my guess is that most Americans want vulnerable people to have health care. There is a lot of commonality around this idea of no, we don't want to save money by denying health care to people who wouldn't otherwise get it. And I think there's a way to balance these considerations so that we make the market for health care more efficient and price responsive.

Let market signals come through while also ensuring that people who can't otherwise get health care are able to access it. I think we can do both of those things. I have confidence in us. And that's an area where I think we have really ridiculous conversations.

Lauren: Yeah, my last book was on healthcare reform and it's on Amazon for anyone interested in a shameless plug.

But to go back to the independent question before we go off on a healthcare policy rant: why aren't politicians actually listening to what their own voters want, as well as the broader electorate? Are there specific incentive structures that you think we would need to change in order to improve our national dialogue or the political choices that we have?

Has anything risen to the level of this is something we should really press for?

Lura: Certainly primary reform would go a long way to opening up the field so that you have more competition. But to me, if you're talking about changing incentives and changing primaries, this is really expensive. It takes a long time. The parties are going to fight you tooth and nail.

The people who work in ranked choice voting and primary reform would tell you that they are very poorly funded and the parties are fighting them and the parties are very well funded. So when people are asking me “how do you change the incentive structure?” I don't have a lot of hope there.

I do have hope, though, that getting independents involved is a game changer. Because independents are going to insist on competition, and they do that by split ticket voting. And by swing voting. And to me, the most movable thing in this entire equation is bringing in a bunch of consumers, right?

They're consumers of politics. If we think about them as consumers of politics, bring in a bunch of consumers to this market. And then the parties will have to compete for their votes and so much of the landscape in politics is driven by the two parties trying to protect themselves from competition.

And, that's a lot like the healthcare market: the healthcare behemoths have spent a lot of money lobbying to protect themselves from competition. And everybody wants to be protected from competition in their business life, because it makes life easier and more profitable. I understand why they want it. The problem is that we've arrived at a negative equilibrium. For voters and for health care consumers in that specific market.

If you're asking me what can we do to change the rules of the game so that we have more competition, I don't know. We need buckets of money. And I'm not really hopeful.

But if we can activate independent voters there's this huge opportunity to bring in competition, regardless of what's being permitted or allowed at the very top.

To say: you cannot win an election without the support of independents. That's now true of the presidency. It's going to continue because of demographic changes. That trend's just going to continue. Because there are fewer baby boomers who tend to be partisan, and there are more Gen Z, Gen X, and millennial voters who tend to be more independent.

And if you can't win an election without making these independent voters happy, then you are going to have to be responsive and compete to make them happy as a member of the party, right? And so in this case I don't need to necessarily elect a third party president, right? Or run third party Senate and House candidates.

I can just activate these voters who say, “win me over. I care about affordability. What are you doing?” That's how we bring accountability in. And I think it's our best hope, honestly, that doesn't require massive legal reforms, changing incentives of media. There are a lot of smart people have been working on those issues for a long time and not getting anywhere.

Lauren: When I first started this Substack I was trying to think about whether it made sense to focus on structural barriers or whether to really focus it on individuals and and try to create more agency around individual choices.

And I'm a political scientist. Of course, I'm aware of the structural barriers, right? As a social psychologist, you're also very aware of the structural issues. But I've really narrowed my focus to this bottom up perspective.

First of all, it has to do with trying to provide people with a sense of agency, giving people a sense that they actually do control their environment in some way.

The other piece is I really do want to bring some optimism into our political conversations. And I do think that sometimes I do get deeply pessimistic when I'm talking about how do we reform the Electoral College? Or how do we do X, Y, and Z, right? How do we reform Medicare? I don't know, right? I don't know if that's even possible at this stage. But I do know that the bottom up disruptions actually can do what we can't do top down. So there's really exciting stuff there.

We have a few minutes left and I want to get to one other set of questions. You and I are both parents. We're both concerned about the effect of everything today on kids. I teach college students as well.

And I'm watching very carefully how rising rates of anxiety, depression, deep pessimism about the future is affecting those students as they go out into the world.

Has your work changed or influenced your parenting? And then the broader question is, how do you think polarization has affected parenting right now?

Lura: I love this question. It's so interesting to bring this back to something that we both spend a lot of our time doing when we're not at our day jobs. Our more important jobs are our roles as parents. The two endeavors have informed each other for sure.

One of the things that I have learned as a parent that applies to politics is that there is really no such thing as controlling people or making people do things. And you see it in public policy. For example, when you try to mandate mask wearing during COVID or getting vaccines, right? That's an example of making people where you would even think that it's in their best interest to go along with it, right? Like how hard should it really be? No, there is no making people do things they don’t want to do.

And that actually gets back to your idea of agency: people are highly reactant, which means when you push them, they resist. We have this natural tendency as human beings to seek our own freedom and self determination. And what I've learned with parenting is I cannot make them do anything. I can create an environment where there are fewer bad choices available, right? Or I can also create values and thoughtfulness and teach my kids so that they're making choices in a way that I think is right. But at the end of the day, if I force you to do something, that's actually not great in terms of your long term decision making, right? What I want to do is raise kids with strong principles and values who are prepared to live their lives in alignment with those principles and values.

That is my goal. Making them and forcing them is not going to achieve that goal. And furthermore, it robs them of something that I think they are fundamentally entitled to, which is to live their lives the way they see fit. I don't want them to grow up and do things because I told them to. I want them to do it because they believe that's what's right.

And so I'm not a parent that's super on top of behavioral stuff. In my house, the conversation about swearing is " here are the tradeoffs". You decide it might cost you at school, but hey, that's your call. That part of parenting has been really interesting to me.

And then the other thing that I'll say is that I think that they, even as kids, have insights about what is important and what is possible for them. And if I trample over that stuff by forcing them to do or not do things, then they're missing out on this ability to create a life for themselves that is richer than what I could come up with.

And that really informs how I look at public policy because I think that it's not just a matter of we should let people have self determination and agency. I think it is their innate right as human beings. That is an essential part of what it means to have humanity. And I think it's actually wrong to make people do things or not do them.

So those two things have cross pollinated so that when I look at public policy, I just think what if we structured more things so that it maximized choice for each other?

One of the things that we see that's differs between independents and partisans is that independents are very live and let live. They are very tolerant in the sense that they might not like your choice, but if it's not affecting them, they're perfectly happy for you to do something that they would not choose to do. And I think that kind of attitude like that's very aligned with pluralism, right?

It might be one of the reasons why we're seeing more interest in independents because we just have more societal tolerance for the fact that there are different ways of being, there are different ways of living.

It doesn't harm me if you want to vote for a different party, if you want to go to a church that I wouldn't go to, if you want to eat a certain type of diet, none of those things affect me. And it's not just that I should let you do it; it's I have no moral justification for doing anything else.

Lauren: This has been absolutely amazing, but I don't want to eat up your entire morning. Is there anything we didn't cover about your work or the the Independent Center that you would like to leave readers or listeners or whatever format this comes out in with?

Lura: Yes. I just want to say that I'm really optimistic about the potential for independent voters to disrupt what is wrong in our politics.

And even if you do feel like you have a political home you're welcome to join us. We don't have litmus tests. We're not saying, “Hey, you have to vote third party to be one of us.” We’re just are a collection of independent minded people who want to have conversations about public policy and about politics.

We have a website where you can read about different aspects of independent voters. We have our surveys. We talk about some policies and we also have resources.

So if you are trying to figure out how to register as an independent in your state, we have that on the website. It's www.independentscenter.org. And at the top of the page, we have a newsletter that highlights some stuff that's going on and we would love for you to sign up.

We’re hoping to do some in person gatherings this year as we grow our operations and our programming, because we feel like it's really important to meet other people who feel the same way that you do. Because again, we're trying to create a movement.

We're trying to create an identity that is being an independent and it's not just words on a page. It's also relationships and I can tell you that like the people I've met doing this work like you have just been so inspiring and it's been so exciting and gratifying to see, “oh, there are people who are looking at things the way I do.”

And we want our audience to have that feeling as well.

Lauren: Wonderful. I will have links to all of those so you can find Lura's work and the Independent Center’s work. Thanks so much for joining me!

As always, let me know what you think!

Are independent voters the wave of the future? What kinds of individual choices or structural changes (or both) do you think offer the most hope? Or is there anything we missed you want to add? Questions for Lura? Whatever! Leave me a comment! And if you like what you read, subscribe and share.