Dem
47
GOP
53
A new study from The New York Times shows that Democrats are bleeding voters nationwide. So not only did many (young) people vote for Donald Trump in 2024, but they have also changed their partisan registration from Democratic to Republican. This is more ominous for the blue team than a one-time engagement of marginal voters who like Trump's style. Some of them are now becoming actual Republicans in the 30 states that have registration by party.
Here is the change in registered voters from 2020 to 2024 in all the states that have partisan registration:
In every single state that registers voters by party, the share of registered Democrats went down during the Biden administration. The changes are from very little to as much as 8%. That's a lot. In contrast, Republican registration is up in many states, but not all. It is actually down in Alaska, Nevada, Colorado and some other states. When both parties are down, it means people are reregistering as independents. In many states, this is a dumb move. All it means is that you can't vote in any primary, depending on whether state primaries are open, semi-open, or closed.
All in all, Democrats lost 2.1 million registrants and Republicans gained 2.4 million registrants. Democrats went from an 11-point registration margin in 2020 to a 6-point edge in 2024. But these numbers have to be treated carefully, as California and New York have partisan registration whereas Texas and most states in the South do not. This means millions of Republicans don't show up in the registration statistics. In 2024, for the first time, more new voters signed up as Republicans than as Democrats. All four battleground states that do partisan registration—Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania—show Democrats losing ground. A lot of the loss is in nonwhite working-class voters.
Registration is a lagging indicator. People typically stop voting for a party for years before they go to the trouble of traipsing down to city hall to formally change their party registration. Kentucky and West Virginia have been voting Republican for years, but the Republicans only recently had a registration majority there. So, in a sense, the registration changes are a formalization of what we already knew: Republicans are getting more popular and Democrats are getting less popular. Most of the changes are Democrat to Republican. A change like that is a statement. It says people are fed up with the Democrats.
Some of the details are grim for the Democrats. In 2020, 59% of men newly registering picked the Democrats. In 2024, that was 39%. Among new Latino voters, in 2020, 52% were Democrats; in 2024, that was 33%. This has serious implications for how Democrats operate. They used to set up nonprofits to go out and register young people and Latinos. But if these people are choosing to register as Republicans, the plan needs to be rethought.
Step 1 would probably be to figure out why the Democratic brand is struggling so badly. It could be that no one knows what the Democrats support—including the Democrats. The Republican Party is fairly homogeneous and it is easy to formulate what it stands for and against. It is for lower taxes, and less government except for a strong military. It is against crime, abortion, immigrants, brown people, gay people, DEI, and wokeness. Democrats are a big-tent party and all over the map.
The most obvious change for the Democrats is to go all in on jobs, wages, and the economy. This would mean dropping or deemphasizing some issues that part of the party thinks are really important, like climate change, DEI, gay rights, and definitely trans rights. It might even mean that Democrats need to tell some of the more progressive Democrats to kindly shut up. They are not likely to take that well. That might require the DCCC to actively recruit and fund primary opponents to people like Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), Ilhan Omar (MN-05) and Rashida Tlaib (MI-12), who say things that cause many voters to dislike the Democrats. This will not go over well with everyone. But the reality is that when some random Democrat yells "Defund the police," Republicans pick that up and make that person the face of the Democratic Party. It simply doesn't work the other way. There is no way the Democrats can make Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) the face of the Republican Party. It isn't doable. So Democrats may have to control their extremists but Republicans don't. That's politics. (V)