Leaders of Maryland’s two major political parties ought to take note: This year’s election not only marks a modest rise in voter registration to more than 4.2 million, it likely signals a growing disaffection with Democratic and Republican politics. Both parties saw a dip in their share of Maryland’s registered voters. The clear statistical winner? That would be unaffiliated voters. As of Oct. 20, more than one in five Maryland voters are independent and unaligned with any political party. Three presidential elections ago, the ratio was closer to one in seven.

Republicans may soon be outnumbered.

That may sound like a relatively small shift. Nationally, about 17% of voters registered as independent. But Maryland is not a typical state. It has among the highest percentage of voters registered as Democrats (52%) of all the states with the GOP a distant second at 24%. That imbalance means a lot of important choices are made at the primary level. It is not uncommon in certain heavily Democratic jurisdictions — Baltimore, in particular — to have contested primaries but uncontested general elections.

That reality has long provided a strong incentive for young people in Central Maryland (where the Democratic imbalance is the greatest) to register as Democrats even if they do not feel full kinship there. That half-heartedness may help explain how Larry Hogan, a Republican, could be elected Maryland’s governor twice — although his party’s rightward drift in the Donald Trump era has clearly hampered his U.S. Senate run this year with polls suggesting he now trails Democrat Angela Alsobrooks.

State lawmakers could, of course, make some modest reforms to accommodate this trend. One would be to shift away from Maryland’s closed primary system that prevents independents from voting in party primaries (unless they re-register as members of a party) to one that outright allows unaffiliated voters to participate in a party’s primary (while perhaps still excluding individuals registered to a different party).

But we’re betting that won’t happen. Democrats have too much incentive to maintain the status quo with its 2-to-1 advantage over the GOP. But what happens if Republicans become wholly irrelevant as unaffiliated voters surpass their ranks? We don’t think more concentrated power is a wise path to good governance in Baltimore, in Annapolis or anywhere else. The registration trends suggest a disenchantment with partisan politics, but will that matter to Democrats in the State House?