No doubt all you righties will be thrilled and, even though you NEVER believe anything the Times publishes, you will rush to believe this....Since the Times is behind a pay wall, as a public service I have copied and pasted much of the article but it's just too long to copy and paste the entire thing. So a link is provided at the end for those of you who are subscribers.
"The Democratic Party Faces A Voter Registration Crises
The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.
Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.
That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.
The stampede away from the Democratic Party is occurring in battleground states, the bluest states and the reddest states, too, according to a new analysis of voter registration data by The New York Times. The analysis used voter registration data compiled by L2, a nonpartisan data firm.Few measurements reflect the luster of a political party’s brand more clearly than the choice by voters to identify with it — whether they register on a clipboard in a supermarket parking lot, at the Department of Motor Vehicles or in the comfort of their own home.
And fewer and fewer Americans are choosing to be Democrats.
In fact, for the first time since 2018, more new voters nationwide chose to be Republicans than Democrats last year.
All told, Democrats lost about 2.1 million registered voters between the 2020 and 2024 elections in the 30 states, along with Washington, D.C., that allow people to register with a political party. (In the remaining 20 states, voters do not register with a political party.) Republicans gained 2.4 million.
There are still more Democrats registered nationwide than Republicans, partly because of big blue states like California allow people to register by party, while red states like Texas do not. But the trajectory is troublesome for Democrats, and there are growing tensions over what to do about it.
Democrats went from nearly an 11-percentage-point edge over Republicans on Election Day 2020 in those places with partisan registration, to just over a 6-percentage-point edge in 2024.
That swing helps to explain President Trump’s success last year, when he won the popular vote for the first time, swept the swing states and roared back to the White House.
“I don’t want to say, ‘The death cycle of the Democratic Party,’ but there seems to be no end to this,” said Michael Pruser, who tracks voter registration closely as the director of data science for Decision Desk HQ, an election-analysis site. “There is no silver lining or cavalry coming across the hill. This is month after month, year after year.”
The shifts also previewed Democratic weaknesses in 2024. The party saw some of its steepest declines in registration among men and younger voters, the Times analysis found — two constituencies that swung sharply toward Mr. Trump.
All four presidential battleground states covered by the Times analysis — Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — showed significant Democratic erosion.
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. In Nevada, Democrats suffered the steepest percentage-point plunge of any state but West Virginia between 2020 and 2024. The share of voters choosing to register with either party went down after the state adopted an automatic voter registration system, but the Democratic decline allowed Republicans to briefly surpass Democrats earlier this year.
For many years, more and more voters have been registering as independents or unaffiliated, sapping both parties’ rolls. More recently, however, that growth has come mostly at the expense of Democrats.
Top Democratic strategists say the party’s nationwide registration decline is a hidden-in-plain-sight crisis that must be reversed before the 2028 election.
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.
In six years, the G.O.P.’s share rose by 9 percentage points; the Democratic share dropped nearly 8 points.
The Times compiled registration data from L2 and compared it to state records across the country to show the scope of the registration decline for Democrats, and interviewed more than two dozen party strategists and officials involved in registration efforts.
“We fell asleep at the switch,” said Maria Cardona, a veteran party strategist and longtime member of the Democratic National Committee.
But Democrats are divided and flummoxed over what to do.
For years, the left has relied on a sprawling network of nonprofits — which solicit donations from people whose identities they need not disclose — to register Black, Latino and younger voters. Though the groups are technically nonpartisan, the underlying assumption has been that most new voters registering would vote Democratic.
Mr. Trump upended that calculation with the inroads he made with working-class nonwhite voters.
“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,” Ms. Cardona said.
Behind the scenes, a fierce fight is underway over how Democrats should address their sagging voter registration numbers and which groups should receive funding to do the work. It’s a battle with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, pitting partisans against philanthropists and some of the Democratic Party’s most important constituencies against one another.
Voter registration is an important barometer of a state’s political tilt, even if it doesn’t necessarily predict the outcome of the next election.
Experts sometimes call it a lagging indicator, because people typically stop voting with a party years before they formally register with a new one. Kentucky and West Virginia, for example, each flipped to a Republican registration advantage only in recent years, though both states turned red in presidential contests long ago.
Tom Bonier, one of the Democratic Party’s leading experts on voter registration trends, spent much of 2024 downplaying the seriousness of his party’s registration woes. He has now come around.
“I was wrong,” he said in an interview.
“Clearly, in retrospect, we can say the Democratic Party had dug itself in too deep a hole in the preceding four years for the Harris campaign to dig itself out in the last few months,” added Mr. Bonier, referring to the 2024 bid by former Vice President Kamala Harris. He now calls the registration figures “a big flashing red alert.”
Grim milestones of Democratic decline have been piling up."
TER won't let me post more than this.
