For months, the media has complained at length about how Democrats are leaderless, rudderless, and underfunded. But post-election-loss handwringing and emo introspection are historically common. So it’s been impossible to handicap whether the Democrats’ problems were performative or profound. But yesterday, the New York Times debuted another disastrous-admission piece headlined, “The Democratic Party’s Voter Registration Crisis.
“The Democratic Party,” the Times bitterly complained, “is hemorrhaging voters.” There’s literally no good news, anywhere they look. “Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party,” the article explained, “Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.”
“The stampede away from the Democratic Party is occurring in battleground states, the bluest states and the reddest states, too,” the Times warned. “Fewer and fewer Americans are choosing to be Democrats.” According to the story, in the last four years, Dems lost -2.1M voters and Republicans gained +2.4M— a 4.5M swing to the right. The counter-revolution is finally showing up in the numbers.
In raw percentage terms, 4.5 million out of ~160–170 million registered voters is only about 2–3% of the electorate. On its face, that sounds modest. But a shift of even 1–2% in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Arizona can flip the presidency. 4.5 million voters is more than the entire population of battleground states like Nevada. It’s even worse during off-year elections like the upcoming midterms.
🔥 Even worse for Dems, voter registration is a lagging indicator, because people usually start voting differently long before they formally switch party registration. Which means if the rolls are already showing a 4.5 million rightward swing, the real erosion underneath the “Democratic brand” must be even deeper. It’s like finding a stream of water flowing out of the ground somewhere far out on your property and then, after testing, discovering it’s coming from underneath the yard from the pool.
Michael Pruser, director of data science for Decision Desk HQ, said, “I don’t want to say, ‘The death cycle of the Democratic Party,’ but there seems to be no end to this.”
There’s no clear solution to this kind of historic flight from a major political party. “Democrats,” the Times noted, “are divided and flummoxed over what to do.” At this point, a Democrat comeback would take either a Clinton-style centrist rebrand or a once-in-a-generation political leader who can break Trump’s hold on working-class voters. It’s not impossible, but it’s getting there.
NOTE: The local Duval GOP reported a few weeks ago that for the first time ever they had closed the registration gap to under 10,000.
