Pennsylvania Democratic Voter Registration Tops 4 Million, Will Go Higher

Dan Balz:

Figures released by Pennsylvania's Department of State on Monday night showed that Democrats have topped 4 million registered voters, the first time either party in the state has crossed that threshold. Democrats have added 161,000 to their rolls, a gain of about 4 percent; Republican registration has dipped about 1 percent, to 3.2 million.

The total so far is 4,044,952. Those are just the ones they've processed as of 11 a.m. Monday. They're not done counting yet.

No political party in Pennsylvania has ever hit 4 million registered voters before. Out of 8.2 million total registered voters, 120,000 are new voters. Again, to give you a sense of scale, Kerry won Pennsylvania in 2004 by about 144,000 votes.

About 43,000 people signed up as Democrats in one week:

According to the Pennsylvania Department of State, 19,639 new voters signed up in the period between March 10 and 17, the latest statewide data available. Of those, 14,256 registered as Democrats.

Also, 29,060 people changed their party affiliation to Democrat in just those seven days.

[The total Democratic] numbers don't reflect the major voter registration push that the Clinton and Obama campaigns waged this past weekend, leading up to yesterday's deadline.

(Emphasis added.) That means the last three days of registrations aren't in yet. To give you an idea of what that means, I only worked two of those days and I signed up 190 people, out of 294 total registered between Saturday, March 15, through Monday, March 24. That is, I signed up more people in two days this weekend than I had in the previous week. If those numbers hold up statewide, we might have another 50,000 new Democrats when the counting stops.

Balz says that this turns the conventional wisdom on its head: Rather than being a net negative for the Democrats, the continued competition between Hillary and Obama is jacking up Democratic voter registration.  I agree.

The most obvious effect is that, all else equal, people who vote in the Presidential primary will also vote in the general. Also, people who vote for the Democratic presidential candidate in the general may be more inclined to vote a straight ticket. In this case, "all else equal" is the big caveat. If the losing Democratic candidate's supporters are embittered or otherwise turned off, all else is not equal. Also, for the downticket races, there is this:

Many of the voters who recently changed registrations were likely "Weak identifiers" who were on the fence anyway and are less partisan, said Berwood Yost, director of the Floyd Institute for Public Policy at Franklin and Marshall College.

"I guarantee you these are not people who vote their party line," he said. Borick and Yost doubt the registration changes will have much of an effect on contested races down the ballot for the Legislature or Congress.

Okay, I can accept they won't vote straight D. But for the Congressional races, campaigning by the Democratic nominee they switched to vote for might change that.

Assignments for reporters:

1. If there is polling data, how do the new and changed Democratic voters in Pennsylvania intend to vote?  The same question applies to every other state.

2. What are the total new and changed Democratic registrations nationwide for competitive Congressional districts?

Comments

[Nan]

Any indication of how many might be ditto heads following the advice of Rush and his ilk to register Republican to vote for Hillary to skew the results because they've decided she'll be easier to beat? On C-Span this past weekend several callers said they had switched from Repug to Dem specifically to vote for Hillary in the primary but planned to vote for McCain in the general election.

[Mithras]

Yeah, I addressed that here.

[Nan]

Well, now I know what happens when I miss a day or two on the computer. Next time I'll try to remember to scroll down to see what all got written while I wasn't looking.