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Remember your first college romance?  Maybe you met him at a coffee house during freshman orientation or in class a little later on.  Whatever, something clicked. You became lovers, inseparable.

As Iris Dement sings in “,” there was nothing you would not do for a chance to see his face.

But soon, so soon, the fissures appear. Little annoyances become big things. You try to change him, but of course that fails.

So you break it off.   There are plenty of other men out there.

At least in theory. But it turns out that when push comes to shove — the need to find a date for your cousin’s wedding, the need to talk, or just the need for, well, you know — you call the same old ex-lover.

You tell everyone, “Oh he’s just my ex-boyfriend.  Now we’re just friends.”

But however you define this relationship, you keep on hanging on, telling yourself that it’s really something else.

That’s how political party affiliation in the U.S. works.   As Karen M. Kaufmann, John R. Petrocik, and Daron R. Shaw put it in their book “,” “Americans hate to love their party, but they do.”

An individual’s political party identification develops at an early age and typically remains quite stable.  It’s still not very clear why this is the case, but some recent research by Yar Ghitza and Andrew Gelman indicates that something formative happens beginning around the age of 18, the same age you were when you met your lover.

Today there appears to be far fewer people willing to call themselves either Republicans or Democrats.  A 2014 national Gallup poll indicated that 42 percent of the respondents considered themselves independents.

That is the highest number since Gallup began polling on that question 25 years ago and considerably larger than the number of people calling themselves either Democrat or Republican.

According to an enormous amount of research, which is nicely analyzed in “Unconventional Wisdom,” there has been a steady trend toward identifying as independent  since 1952 when over three-quarters of the public identified themselves as either Republican or Democrat.

This change has led to all sorts of predictions about the demise of the Democratic and Republican parties at the expense of truly non-partisan third party movements fueled by the growing number of independent voters who are tired of partisan bickering.

So it would appear that the bad boyfriend might be finally be gone.  We’re moving on.

Not So Fast

Well, no.   Many more people now say they are independent, but if you look at how they actually vote, the US electorate is as partisan as ever.

A very large majority of self-defined independents in fact continue to have consistent partisan preferences and vote accordingly.  Most self-identified independents lean consistently and heavily toward one party or the other.  One example: In presidential voting there is very little difference between weak Republicans and independents who lean Republican.

So once you look at what independents do rather than what they say, the picture looks quite different.

Partisanship has not diminished.  Only the willingness to call yourself partisan has.

A national Gallup Poll taken at the beginning of July showed that 82 percent of the people surveyed either explicitly identified as Republican or Democrat or leaned in that direction.  That is very much like Hawaii where a 2013 poll showed that 84 percent of Hawaii’s citizens either identified with or leaned toward one of the two major parties.

Do the math, and you see the disparity.  Forty-two per cent of the public calls themselves independents, but only 18 percent don’t vote either predictably Democratic or predictably Republican.

Partisanship has not diminished.  Only the willingness to call yourself partisan has.  As the authors of “Unconventional Wisdom” admit, it is still a mystery why this is the case.

For whatever reasons, for voters party identification and accordingly political parties play as crucial a role as ever. However you describe your relationship, your ex-boyfriend is still your boyfriend.

Why is this the case?  Why don’t Americans get off the schneid and kiss the parties good-bye like the woman in the Iris Dement song finally does (though it takes her well into middle age before she does it)?

Election rules are a disincentive.  All of our important national elections are winner-take-all, so it has been historically close to impossible for independents to mount an election campaign effective enough to win a majority.

Hawaii’s primary election laws discourage third party or non-partisan voting.  For the 2014 primary there are five political parties on the ballot, including the Independent Party. But a voter is entitled to vote only for the candidates of one party or only for non-partisan candidates.

None of these parties offer anything even remotely close to a full slate of candidates.

So those choosing to an alternative party or non-partisan ballot have virtually no one to vote for, and the candidates they can vote for have little chance of winning.

Maybe you are willing to do this out of principle, but you sacrifice the opportunity to make the candidate choices that really are going to matter.  That is a choice most people do not even consider making no matter how ambivalent they are about the major party candidates.

Hawaii’s Primary Rules An Issue

Some states have changed their primary rules in order to discourage partisanship.  So far there is no evidence that that has made a difference, and the public does not seem very interested in moving that way.

Partisanship meets deeper needs that have little to do with election laws. Partisan sources still offer the most common and influential cues to people attentive to politics. They are key links to the political world, no matter how much you hate Fox News or MSNBC.

People who are most attentive to politics are the ones most likely to get information from partisan sources that reinforce their beliefs.

What you call yourself may change, but the way you get information about politics still depends on the same processes that favor partisanship, whether these are media, elites, or people you normally hang out with.

Primaries like Hawaii’s complicate matters for the overwhelming number of voters who are partisans.

The small number of “true” independents who do not consistently vote for one major party or the other don’t sit around poring through the umpteen thousand pages of the Affordable Care Act before making their choices. On the contrary.  In reality they are more likely to be information isolates having no familiar sources at all to turn to for cues.

Primaries like the one coming up in Hawaii complicate matters for the overwhelming number of voters who are partisans because the usual political cues are much less clear.

(Consumer alert: there is far less good knowledge about primaries than there is about general elections.)

In a general election whether a candidate is Democrat or Republican is key.  In a primary where you have a heated contest between two Democrats in both the governor and U.S. Senate races as well as a large handful of Democratic hopefuls in the First Congressional District race that party cue goes by the boards.  This is particularly true because none of the candidates in these three races is clearly the party’s choice.

So we see alternative cues become important especially during the last few weeks of the 2014 campaigns.

One is  “I am the one true Democrat.”  See the number of ads and brochures that stress protecting Medicare and Social Security along with the huge number of pictures of candidates alongside kupuna.   Okay, enough already, we get it.

Another cue is “I am the truly competent one,” which every candidate, but especially Colleen Hanabusa, stresses.

There are others, but the real point is that absent straightforward partisan cues coming from those political parties that Americans love to hate, the voter is at more of a loss.   Maybe that’s one reason why turnout is always so much lower in primary elections.

Come the November election, Hawaii’s voters will be comfortable again because the reliable, partisan, easier to assess sources of information will be there for them.

Their boy friend’s back.