October Voter Registration Updates Spell Trouble for Democrats

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

Polls indicate the 2024 Presidential election is going to be close. According to Nate Silver, well this is about as close as it gets, with early voting already underway in most states.

Here is Nate Silver’s prediction algorithm as of October 17:

Assuming a close race, it’s generally considered that 43 States are mostly decided for Republican or Democrat (with the potential exception of Virginia) the battleground states are generally considered to be:

Nevada

Michigan

Pennsylvania

Wisconsin

Arizona

Georgia

North Carolina

Do Voter Registration Trends Matter?

Trouble is brewing for the Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris in her campaign for President, and you can see it in voter registation trends.

How do voter register trends affect these races?

Nationally, voter registration has shifted around 3 million since the 2020 Presidential election, as I wrote about here.

When presenting this data on social media, I’ve been a number of reasons that seem to invalidate these numbers. Let’s dig in to see if these are valid.

1. Registration by party does not mean votes. In 2020, there were many suburban Republican women who voted for Biden, and many union workers for voted for Trump. Ok, there is some validity to this. Also, not all registered voters vote, they of course have to vote, so partially true.
2. Voter registration is a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. Meaning, after voting a different way than a voter is registered, perhaps even several times, switching voter registration would be the final step. Well, okay, let’s assume this is true, or at least partly true. It certainly doesn’t apply much after the primary (such as Democrats registering as Republicans to vote for Nikki Haley) and it doesn’t matter at all in the final weeks of the campaign.