The share of democratic registrations is decreasing, but what does this mean?

Newly registered voters, who are disproportionately young and non-white, tend to lean Democratic.

That has been less and less the case during the Biden era.

A majority of states ask people to select a party affiliation when they register, and last year newly registered Democrats made up only about 53 percent of those who chose a major party — beating Republican registrations by a narrow margin from 26 percent to 23 percent. of total registrations – according to data from L2, a nonpartisan provider of voter data.

The tepid Democratic numbers among new registrants are a small but surprising part of Donald J. Trump’s slim lead in the polls. Summarizing the last two New York Times/Siena College national polls, President Biden leads by less than a percentage point among voters who say they voted in 2020, but trails by 23 points among those who say they voted in 2020 — and about a third of those nonvoters are new registrants, who don’t offer Democrats their usual support.

The party’s underperformance among newly registered voters is all the more striking given the demographic makeup of the new voters. Half are under 30 years old and half are non-white. Yet they are less Democratic than the older and whiter voters who have already registered with party registration in the same states.

And states with party registration are more Democratic than the nation as a whole — voting for President Biden by an average of nine percentage points in 2020. So if Democratic registrations in those states only have a three-point lead, that may not bode well. for the party throughout the country.

Why are Democrats doing so poorly among newly registered voters? Unfortunately it’s hard to say. Voter registration data can be weird. It can be affected by events that trigger new registrations, such as the lead-up to a presidential primary or a Supreme Court decision such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In those cases, shifts in voter registration may not have long-term significance.

New voter registration also comes from a special group of people: those who were previously unregistered, those who are newly eligible, and people who are re-registering at a new address. The trends among these voters may not be representative of the broader population.

As a result, the numbers are not as clear as they seem. The best argument for Republicans is that this confirms the deterioration of Democratic status among young and non-white voters, as shown in national polls. That’s certainly possible, but it’s not a slam dunk.

Since 2019, every group of voters under 70 has become much less likely to register as Democrats, compared to Republicans. It’s a trend that broadly follows the pattern of recent national polls, which show Biden struggling to maintain support among young voters even as he holds steady against those 65 and older.

But most of the decline in Democratic numbers results in an increase in the independent share of registrants, not an increase in the number of Republican registrants. We don’t know much about these unaffiliated voters. But given that many come from traditionally left-wing groups (young and non-white), the party can hope that they are still Democratic-leaning, even if they don’t call themselves Democrats.

A related possibility is that the declining Democratic strength reflects the peculiarities of what would have driven voter registration in 2019 versus 2023: the Democratic presidential primaries in 2020 and the Republican in 2024. It would certainly make sense for partisans to register earlier the their party’s presidential primaries, and that would have helped Democrats in 2019 and Republicans in 2023. Likewise, many independent-minded Democrats could likely have registered as Democrats in 2019 to ensure they would be eligible to run vote in the upcoming Democratic election. These types of statements would leave open the possibility that Democrats will experience a surge in registrations in 2024, after a non-competitive primary but ahead of the general election.

One intriguing possibility is that today’s Republican strength is a function of past Democratic registration strength. Imagine, for example, that “resistance voters” who opposed Mr. Trump were highly motivated to register to vote during the Trump years. If so, the remaining unenrolled group would be disproportionately made up of voters who lacked the energy to oppose Trump. At some point, new registrants would become relatively Trump-friendly.

This statement is supported by one quirk in the data: If you look closely at the graph, you’ll notice that the drop in Democratic enrollment isn’t very large among those ages 18 to 21, but the shift is much larger among 22 and 21 year olds. older. This basic pattern could be explained if anti-Trump registration has already exhausted the pool of potential anti-Trump voters among those eligible in 2020. But anti-Trump voters who were too young in 2019 could register for the first time in 2023.

These explanations all have some merit. I suspect there’s a mix of all at play – including the possibility that this reflects a real shift in public opinion away from Democrats. Interestingly, 2023 was actually the Biden administration’s most democratic year in terms of new registration among voters over 65; it was the Biden administration’s worst year for people under 30. That’s the pattern we’re seeing in the polls, and it’s hard to explain why this would show up in the registration data if there weren’t some kind of change in public opinion. opinion.