Parties race to register new voters
Republicans appear to have an early lead in the battle to register new voters for the fall election, but Democratic activists are pushing back, making inroads in recent months in several states that could be crucial to the presidential contest.
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Both sides are waging early, aggressive enrollment campaigns, but in the 3 years since the photo finish of the last presidential election, Republicans have cut into Democratic registration leads in four battleground states with a combined 60 electoral votes -- Pennsylvania and Oregon, which Democrat Al Gore won in 2000, plus West Virginia and Florida, both carried by George W. Bush.
Democrats, meanwhile, have sliced into Republican registration advantages in two key states with a total of 11 electoral votes -- Iowa, barely carried by Gore, and New Hampshire, narrowly won by Bush. As the sites of the first two contests in the Democratic presidential nominating process, both had record partisan turnouts in January.
If the 2000 results were an indicator, party registration figures could be significant this November.
''There was a fairly close connection between party registration and who won the state in 2000," said Rhodes Cook, an independent analyst of election data who has tracked the trend of declining allegiance to major parties. ''In 20 of 22 states outside the South, the party that had more registered voters than the other party carried the state."
The exceptions were West Virginia and Iowa. Southern states that register voters by party are all heavily Democratic but went for Bush four years ago, usually by wide margins.
In all, 27 states plus the District of Columbia have registration by party; 22 do not register voters by party affiliation, including potential swing states like Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin, Washington, Arkansas, and Minnesota. Those states are also being targeted for registration drives.
''The level of activity is unprecedented in our state by everyone on all sides," said Mary Kiffmeyer, Minnesota's secretary of state. In 2000, Gore's victory margin in the state was 2.4 percent.
No other state has the same voter registration procedure as Ohio, which holds 20 electoral votes that in some November scenarios could be decisive. Bush carried the state by 3.5 percent four years ago, and no Republican has won the White House without Ohio's electoral votes.
Democratic voters now outnumber Republicans in the Buckeye State for the first time in four years, primarily because of a quirk in the way the state identifies political affiliation -- solely by votes cast in recent partisan primaries. This year, turnout in the contested Democratic presidential primary was much heavier than on the Republican side, where Bush was unopposed, tipping party figures to the Democrats, who hold a 288,081 advantage, according to figures compiled by the Ohio secretary of state's office. About 65 percent of Ohio voters are now listed as nonpartisan.
Ohio is the target of intense voter enlistment efforts by both parties. A Boston Globe examination of several counties indicates that in the first half of 2004, voters are registering at nearly double the pace of four years ago.
America Coming Together, a Democratic activist group, had spent $1.1 million in Ohio through April, mostly to pay more than 700 canvassers and staff who conduct voter registration and persuasion efforts there, according to an analysis last week of federal records by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity. ACT, which is operating in 17 battleground states, had spent about $9 million in other states.
Sarah Leonard, a spokeswoman for ACT, said the organization's paid and volunteer workers ''have knocked on millions of doors and registered hundreds of thousands of new voters in targeted states." About 65,000 of the registrations are in Ohio, she said.
Republicans are also very active in the state. The Republican National Committee's mobile registration truck, a 56-foot, 18-wheeler dubbed ''Reggie the Registration Rig" was in Columbus, the state capital, on Friday, its third Ohio stop since debuting in March as part of what the GOP says will be "the largest voter registration drive" in party history.
Blaise Hazelwood, the RNC's political director, said the party has already enrolled 2.5 million new voters, on its way to its goal of 3 million before the election. The party also uses Reggie to recruit what it calls ''team leaders," a key element of its organizational effort to turn out voters in November. The party has identified more than 1.1 million team leaders, RNC spokeswoman Christine Iverson said, and they organize potential voters along areas of common interest. The RNC website lists 37 such affinity groupings. Besides ethnic and religious denominations, there are links for people who identify themselves as homeschoolers, first-responders, sportsmen, and stock car race fans.
Republicans have scored a net gain of about 16,000 new voters in Oregon, more than twice the size of Gore's slim margin in 2000. But the party's gain of about 41,000 in Pennsylvania is about a fifth of the number Gore won by. An increase of about 15,000 voters in West Virginia equals about 40 percent of Bush's margin of victory in 2000.
In New Hampshire, Democrats have posted a net gain of nearly 32,000 voters, a number more than four times Bush's edge. Since Gore narrowly won Iowa by about 4,000 votes, the party has gained almost 19,000 new voters.
Another state that is a high priority in the voter race is Florida, where the disputed recount gave Bush a 537-vote victory and the election of 2000. Since then, Republicans have continued to try to reduce the Democratic advantage in the Sunshine State. Most recent official figures show the GOP has reduced the Democratic margin by 23,339, to about 350,000, since the last presidential voting.
More recently, there have been encouraging signs for the Democrats in Florida, where there are many organizations, not all of them partisan, engaged in registration efforts. After ACT opened for business in Florida in January and during the period leading up to the state's March 9 presidential primary, the Republican trend reversed. Between January and April, Democrats added 81,000 new voters compared with 49,000 for Republicans, according to reports from the secretary of state. ACT's 110 paid canvassers have enrolled 33,580 new voters, said Karin Johanson, the organization's state director.
While many groups seek to enlist voters to help their own cause, they must submit to local election authorities all registration cards that are filled out, regardless of affiliation. For that reason, ACT canvassers concentrate in traditionally Democratic precincts, Johanson said.
The Florida pattern is repeated in two other battleground states -- Arizona and Nevada. In both of those states, Republicans have gained slightly in registration since the 2000 election, but Democratic enrollments have picked up since the start of this year.
In another trend that may have more bearing on the makeup of the US Senate than the outcome of the race for the White House, Republicans have registered solid gains since 2000 in four southern states, all with competitive Senate races this fall. Each of these states -- Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Oklahoma -- is strongly Democratic in registration but went for Bush four years ago. Since then, in the combined states, Republicans gained more than 500,000 in registration, ranging from an additional 66,442 in Kentucky to 166,099 in North Carolina. 