Dems Panic as Party Faces Voter Registration Crisis

Democrats lost “bigly” in November of 2024, with Republicans retaking the Senate and maintaining control of the House of Representatives, and President Donald Trump returning to the White House with both the Electoral College and the popular vote under his belt. According to a recent report, however, the Democratic Party’s voter troubles are far from over.

Reviewing voter registration data, The New York Times reported this week that voter registrations for the Democratic Party between the 2020 and 2024 elections are down — by significant numbers, in some cases — across all 30 states that require voters to register with a political party. “The stampede away from the Democratic Party is occurring in battleground states, the bluest states and the reddest states, too,” wrote NYT analysts Shane Goldmacher and Jonah Smith.

Alaska, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming, along with Washington, D.C., all track voter party registration and Democrats have seen a sharp decline in voters registering with their party across all 30 states and D.C. The drop has been especially pronounced in Nevada, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and West Virginia, but still significant in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

Overall, among those 30 states, Democratic Party voter registration has fallen by 7% between 2020 and 2024, accounting for a loss of over two million registered voters nationwide. To complicate matters for Democrats, voters registering as Republicans have increased in 22 of those 30 states, accounting for an 8% spike, roughly 4.5 million registered voters. On Election Day in 2020, Goldmacher and Smith noted, Democrats had an advantage of more than 10 percentage points over Republicans in voter registrations in those 30 states, which dwindled to a barely six-point lead by November 5, 2024. “Consider this: In 2018, Democrats accounted for 34 percent of new voter registrations nationwide, while Republicans were only 20 percent. Yet by 2024, Republicans had overtaken Democrats among new registrants,” Goldmacher and Smith wrote. They added, “In six years, the G.O.P.’s share rose by 9 percentage points; the Democratic share dropped nearly 8 points.”

Late last year, shortly ahead of the election, Republicans began pulling ahead of Democrats in voter registrations, especially in battleground states. Additionally, Gallup found that, for the first time since the polling giant started conducting the survey, more Americans identified as Republicans than as Democrats.

In comments to The Washington Stand, FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter said, “The troubles of the Democrats continue to pile up. This report comes out at the same time their favorability rating is at a 30-year low, the party is strapped for cash, leaderless, and they’re on the verge of a possible redistricting war they will almost certainly lose.” He continued, “As the party numbers dwindle, the voices of the most extreme in their coalition appear louder, screaming at the party to resist the agenda of the first Republican president to win both the national popular vote and electoral college in decades.”

According to the NYT report, Democratic Party strategists, operatives, and donors are panicking. Democratic National Committee (DNC) official Maria Cardona bemoaned, “We fell asleep at the switch.” Democratic Party analyst and voter registration expert Tom Bonier recanted his previous insistence that the party was above water. “I was wrong,” he said. He added, “Clearly, in retrospect, we can say the Democratic Party had dug itself in too deep a hole in the preceding four years for the [ex-Vice President Kamala] Harris campaign to dig itself out in the last few months.”

In particular, party elites are worried about losing demographic voting blocks long-relied upon by Democrats. “You can’t just register a young Latino or a young Black voter and assume that they’re going to know that it’s Democrats that have the best policies,” Cardona said. Goldmacher and Smith observed that, in 2018, two-thirds of newly-registered voters under the age of 45 registered as Democrats, leaving the GOP just under one-third. As of 2024, however, those numbers had changed significantly, with Democrats now claiming less than half (48%) of newly-registered voters under 45 and Republicans earning the majority. The NYT report also pointed out that Democratic Party voter registrations are on the decline among other demographics, including Hispanic voters and women, and is cratering among men.

Ahead of the election last year, numerous surveys showed that Trump was making significant inroads among black voters, especially young black voters and black men, and crippling the Democratic Party’s longtime stranglehold on the Hispanic voter bloc. Men have never been a staple for the Democrats but turned against the party in droves last year — especially young men, who have broken away significantly from their female counterparts on key issues like abortion.

Previously, the Democratic Party has relied heavily on nonprofit and non-government organizations (NGOs) to register non-voters, who often voted blue. Over the past several years, only black newly-registered voters have most consistently registered as Democrats. Democratic Party data analyst and electioneer Aaron Strauss warned that the blanket voter-registration strategy would no longer be effective. “If we were to blindly register nonvoters and get them on the rolls, we would be distinctly aiding Trump’s quest for a personal dictatorship,” Straus claimed, arguing instead for an explicitly partisan approach and only working to register non-voters whose political positions aligned with the Democratic Party’s.

Some party elites, especially wealthy donors, have suggested the possibility of abandoning the expensive voter registration networks altogether in favor of more advertising for candidates and policies. Left-wing donor network head Tory Gravito said, “It would be naïve to call 2024 anything other than a reckoning on the Democratic brand. … To solve a brand problem, you need people talking about that brand — and that requires partisan dollars.” J.B. Poersch, who runs a political action committee (PAC) dedicated to electing Democratic senators, disagreed. “If we’re going to win, if we’re going to be competitive, we need to be investing in both,” he said, casting the choice between funding either voter registration groups or advertising as a “false choice.” The DNC and other Democratic groups, however, have suffered a decline in funding from donors, making the decision where to spend money an important one.

Carpenter commented, “What the New York Times’s article only alludes to is the fact that the constellation of left-wing NGOs that register voters is no longer convinced that registering young and minority voters will necessarily yield new Democratic voters.” He explained, “It used to be a fact in American politics that the higher the turnout, the greater the likelihood that a Democratic candidate would succeed; this was because most low propensity voters were Democrat-leaning.”

He continued, “The Trump coalition has turned this on its head. Now, higher turnout increases the likelihood of a Republican victory.” He concluded, “The Democrats are tangled in a Gordian Knot of difficulties that threaten their chances in 2026 and beyond, and there is little evidence they understand the full extent of their problems or even have the will to address them — so far, all they’ve done is double down on reflexively attacking the president and their Republican colleagues.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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