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Rhodes Cook is a veteran Washington political analyst who tracks national elections and voting trends and publishes a bimonthly political newsletter. Click here for Cook’s full bio.
Democrats may not be that comfortable talking about the troop surge in Iraq, but they have no trouble embracing a surge of a different sort — one that describes the party’s recent voter-registration gains.
Since President George W. Bush’s re-election in November 2004, the Democrats have added more than 800,000 voters to the rolls, while the number of registered Republicans has declined by about the same amount, according to a compilation of recent registration data. Meanwhile, the number of voters not affiliated with either party — the prime “growth stock” among registered voters in the past decade or two — has dropped by nearly 200,000.
These changes reflect recent registration totals from the 29 states and the District of Columbia where voters register by party. To be sure, the number doesn’t include some large electoral vote prizes such as Texas, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, which are among the 21 states where voters don’t register by party. Still, there is no mistaking the clear Democratic trend of late in all parts of the country, which conspicuously includes many of the major battleground states.
Since 2004, for example, the Democrats have lengthened their registration advantage in Florida, Oregon and Pennsylvania, with the Democratic advantage in the latter swelling from less than 600,000 four years ago to nearly 1.1 million registered voters now. The Democrats have also trimmed their registration deficits in Arizona, Colorado and New Hampshire. And two of the most closely contested battlegrounds of late — Iowa and Nevada — have flipped in the past four years. Each had more registered Republicans than Democrats in 2004 but now have more Democrats than Republicans, in each state by a margin of more than 60,000 voters.
The critical question, though, is whether this will mean much in terms of voting in November.
In 2004, it did. At least that was the case outside the South, where the five states with party registration all voted for Republican Bush in spite of a lingering Democratic registration advantage.
Elsewhere, though, there was a strong correlation between a state’s party registration totals and the general-election outcome. Republicans out-registered Democrats in 10 of the 12 non-Southern party registration states carried by Bush (with New Mexico and West Virginia the two exceptions). There were more registered Democrats than Republicans in 11 of the 12 party registration states won by Democrat John Kerry (with New Hampshire the lone exception).
Altogether, that means that nearly 90% of the non-Southern party registration states (21 of 24) cast their electoral votes in 2004 for the party that had more registered voters than the other.
It is unclear whether that trend will be replicated this year.
The 2004 election was essentially a referendum on Bush and his controversial presidency. And as such, it turned into a battle of the bases. Registered Republicans voted almost unanimously for Bush. Registered Democrats were nearly as universal in their support for Kerry, while independents split almost evenly between the two candidates. As a result, the outcome strongly reflected party registration totals in the states that had them.
This election, though, the dynamic is quite different. It is an open-seat race with no incumbent. Questions and concerns swirl around the presumptive nominees of each party. More persuasion will be required by each campaign this time than in 2004, both in wooing independent voters and protecting their own party base from poaching by the other side.
In addition, the loyalty of many of the new Democratic voters is open to question. Those brought in by distaste with the Bush administration and Republican governance are likely supporters of Barack Obama in November. But those who joined the Democrats in order to participate in the high-voltage primary contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton may be more problematic in their support for the party ticket this fall, particularly if they became Democrats to back Clinton.
In short, the party registration totals may not be as prescient this year as they were four years ago. Still, there is no doubt that the current registration trend is another potential advantage for the Democrats in 2008, as well as another headache for the Republicans