Not Good

With just over a year until midterms, one of America’s two main parties is hemorrhaging voters, losing registered voters in all 30 states that track registration by political party. The change has been observed in blue, red, and swing states alike.

In total, some 2.1 million voters ditched the Democrats in favor of alternative politics between 2020 and 2024, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The drop has resulted in more registered independents, but it has also become a boon for the GOP, which gained 2.4 million new voters over the same period.

[…]

The most contentious battleground states have also experienced the liberal erosion. Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania all saw support peel away from Democrats over the last four years.

“In North Carolina, Republicans erased roughly 95 percent of the registration advantage that Democrats held in the fall of 2020, according to state records as of this summer,” reported the Times. “In Nevada, Democrats suffered the steepest percentage-point plunge of any state but West Virginia between 2020 and 2024.”

The Democratic Party has lost so much ground in voter registration that it has a genuine crisis. But that crisis is compounded by a greater one. The party can no longer do non-partisan registration in a cost-effective way. As an old ACORN hand, I can help explain this a little bit.

When I worked at ACORN it really was funded by George Soros through Project Vote. He wanted to help the Democrats win elections and knew that nonpartisan voter registration would help. Project Vote could not legally run a registration program that was aligned with Democrats, and they had to turn in all registration forms regardless of which party the new voter registered with. But Soros’ investment still made sense.

In fact, it was my job to make it work. I analyzed precinct data and found precincts where the Democrats had won at least 65 percent of the vote in the prior election. Anything less than 65 percent wasn’t considered cost-effective. Think about it. If I pay a worker to register 10 voters and only six of them turn out to be Democrats, then I’ve only netted two votes. In a bad sample, I might have even cost the Democrats two votes or made no difference at all.

As you might expect, the places where Democrats win by 65 percent or more usually have large Black and Latino populations. The only strongly Democratic precincts that lack big minority populations are found in college towns. So, my job was basically to run non-partisan voter registration drives in Black and Latino neighborhoods. We didn’t ask how people would vote or tell them which party to register with, but we reliably got a lot more Democratic registrations and the Republican ones because Black and Latino voters strongly preferred the Democrats.

[…]

The problem the Democrats have now is that their advantage with Latinos and young people has eroded to the point that these tactics won’t work. They’ve lost ground with Blacks too, but it’s still cost effective to do nonpartisan registration in many black neighborhoods.