America&rsquo;s voters, obviously up on their Shakespeare, are clear: A plague onbothyour houses. </p><p> In dozens of polls and surveys, more people than ever before now describe themselves as independents &mdash; angry and frustrated with Republicans <em>and</em> Democrats. At the same time, the number of voters pledging allegiance to either major party has plummeted to a near-record low.</p><p> And many of those independents aren&rsquo;t shy about telling researchers and politicians what they&rsquo;re looking for: problem-solvers, not major party hacks.</p><p>&ldquo;They want to get past special interest politics,&rdquo; said Jackie Salit, president of the Committee for a Unified Independent Party, a group formed to make independents a &ldquo;force&rdquo; in national politics. </p><p> The raw numbers are there. A Pew Research Center survey this past summer showed 36 percent of voters &mdash; a record &mdash; considered themselves independents. A new Ipsos-McClatchy poll put independents at 44 percent.</p><p>Exit polls show independent voters were among the keys to Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey last week, and they&rsquo;re expected to be the biggest voting bloc of all in 2010. </p><p> &ldquo;Independents want more direct participation in the policymaking process,&rdquo; Salit said. &ldquo;They want leadership that makes decisions based on what&rsquo;s good for a community, a city, a state, a country.&rdquo;</p><p> But while the short-term influence is obvious, it isn&rsquo;t clear if the growing independent vote &mdash; partially reflected in a summer of tea parties, town halls and protests &mdash; can be turned into a realignment of American politics through a permanent third party or independent coalition.</p><p> Eventually, most Republicans and Democrats believe, independent voters will come back to the fold.</p><p>&ldquo;I am a big fan of the two-party system,&rdquo; former House speaker Newt Gingrich told a University of Kansas audience last week. &ldquo;It forces us to fight out all sorts of things.&rdquo;</p><p>Gingrich ran into his own third-party populist buzz saw this fall by backing a liberal Republican in a special House election in New York &mdash; an election that may show the promise and pitfalls of third-party candidacies.</p><p> Conservatives, including hundreds of tea-party activists, rejected Gingrich&rsquo;s candidate and backed third-party hopeful Doug Hoffman instead. That embarrassed Gingrich, a potential GOP presidential candidate in 2012.</p><p> But Hoffman lost Tuesday. Republicans and Democrats said the outcome suggests that third-party candidates can still cause problems, but they usually struggle to win elections.</p><p>&ldquo;If all you want to do is protest and be angry, that&rsquo;s fine, but, by the way, (Nancy) Pelosi and (Barack) Obama will stay in power,&rdquo; Gingrich said.</p><p>Bill Lacy, executive director of the Dole Institute for Politics and a veteran of several presidential campaigns, said third parties generally fail to last longer than the candidates who start them.</p><p> &ldquo;Third parties are usually personality-driven,&rdquo; Lacy said. &ldquo;You look at Ross Perot (in 1992), John Anderson (in 1980), George Wallace (in 1968) &hellip; you go right down the list, and they&rsquo;re not really parties. They&rsquo;re really groups of followers of an individual.&rdquo;</p><p>Pat Choate, an economist now helping to develop fuels with a company called Green Planet, ran for vice president on Perot&rsquo;s Reform Party ticket in 1996. He says the bad economy explains the surge in independents.</p><p> &ldquo;When times are really good &hellip; most people will just stick with the two parties,&rdquo; Choate said. &ldquo;When you get into tougher times &hellip; people say, &lsquo;Hey, we can do better than that.&rsquo;&ensp;&rdquo;