A slowdown in adding new voters to the rolls during the pandemic has played to Republicans' advantage.
Late last month, the Democratic data firm TargetSmart found that while new voter registrations had plummeted amid the coronavirus pandemic, those who were registering in competitive states tended to be whiter, older and less Democratic than before.
“In some states, before the pandemic, you were seeing a net edge for Democrats,” said Page Gardner, founder and president of the Voter Participation Center, which works to register young people, people of color and unmarried women.For months last year and in early 2020, Democrats had been registering voters at a faster clip than Republicans in many competitive states that register by party, including Iowa, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Arizona and Nevada.
Before the coronavirus, said Tori Taylor, co-executive director of the grassroots Democratic group Swing Left, “we were seeing spikes in voter registration that really pointed to a strong spring and summer.”Because overall registration numbers have been so low across the board during the pandemic, Republican gains during that period have been too small in most cases to make up for months of pre-pandemic Democratic advances.
“We talk about [registration] at every meeting,” said Sarah Mahler, chairwoman of the Democratic Party in Nevada’s Washoe County, a swing county where Democrats outnumber Republicans by just over 100 voters.Democrats widely expect registrations to pick up before Election Day, and they have reason for optimism.
“I don’t want to sugarcoat the situation,” Wessel said. “We have work to do. But young people … while they’re not able to register the same way they normally are, I think they’re expressing how excited they are about politics and what’s going on in other ways.”
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