When it comes to campaigning, Democrats are conservatives Self-identified independent voters are not, not really, argues Alex Shephard at The New Republic. They are leaners, 49 percent of Americans per a recent Gallup poll. They lean toward one of the major parties or the other. They just eschew the branding. It’s not a new argument, but it’s fashionable. “By far the dominant U.S. party isn’t Democrats or Republicans,” wrote Mike Allen of Axios. “It’s: ‘I’ll shop around, thank you.’” Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz told TNR, “There’s a reluctance to openly identify oneself as a partisan and to say, come right out and say, ‘I think of myself as a Republican or a Democrat.’” Shephard explains: Self-described independents and leaners do have one thing in common. “Even among people who identify with a political party … the trend is in their disdain for the other party,” said Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, or IPPSR, and professor of political science at Michigan State University. “That is actually especially true of leaners, that they don’t have a strong positive feeling about the party that they lean toward; they just have a negative feeling about the party that they lean against.” Indeed, more than 60 percent of independents who lean Republican or lean Democrat have “very” or “somewhat” cold opinions of the other party, according to a 2017 Pew Research poll. These voters typically end up voting for Democrats and Republicans simply to ensure the…