Tired of Coalition Politics...Instead Look at Issues Individually on Merits and Priorities

One of the problems I see with the political parties today, as well as with the media outlets that promote their respective philosophies, is that they take an "all-or-nothing" approach to issues, opting for coalitions between different interest groups even when those groups don't have a discernible connection.  As an individual American citizen, I have different opinions on different issues facing me, some of them liberal in orientation and some of them conservative.  Some issues affect me and/or others in my family more intimately than do others, and this matters as to which "side" I support when I vote on election day.  And then there are issues that seem to defy the stances that the parties give them, making me wonder how there could be a liberal vs conservative debate on them since they are non-ideological in nature...

As do many of my fellow Americans, I care about a number of factors when deciding whom to support politically. Two that stand out are how strongly they support our national defense and whether or not they pose a danger to my profession and livelihood by opposing the organization I work for and my right to collectively bargain for better conditions and wages.  With the former, the Republicans/conservatives are the better choice, but with the latter it is clearly the Democrats who stand with me.  Then there are all these other areas like immigration, civil rights, taxation, health care/insurance, conservative vs. liberal judges, infrastructure, education, the space program, environmental and financial regulations, foreign relations and trade, entitlements, equality for women, drug policy and treatments, climate change, abortion, corruption, LGBT community, free speech and religion, etcetera.  On some I have more of a conservative bent, but on others I lean toward the left.  I would rather these issues be discussed on their own merits without feeling the pressure to line up politically with advocates I disagree with just because they support "my" most important issues...that wouldn't work with me anyway since I've already stated that my two main issues are split between the two major parties.  Instead, we're seeing more and more a political homogeneity in each party whereby politicians and media opinion makers tend to go down a checklist of "correct" stances on the issues instead of expressing a more mixed outlook as I have (and I suspect most of the American people as well)...

We used to have a considerable overlap in our political representatives between the Republicans and Democrats, even factoring out the overly conservative nature of Southern Democrats before they migrated to the GOP during the final decades of the twentieth century.  Now the most conservative Democrat in Washington is more liberal than the most liberal Republican, and the so-called "non-partisan" crossover votes I see occurring are more often than not the result of a senator or representative trying to appease voters in their evenly-divided swing states or districts rather than because of their own opinions...you see this a lot in the Senate with the West Virginia, North Dakota, and Indiana Democrats up for reelection in their red states this year...

Taking each issue individually and formulating my own opinions, the result which has me sometimes supporting the Republicans and sometimes supporting the Democrats, does not make me a fence-sitter...on the contrary, I want MY party to incorporate my own views on the issues and offer a clear-cut choice for me.  It is THEY who are failing me with their coalition politics and their unwillingness to allow for a diversity of perspectives on the same issues...