The registration of millions of new voters across the nation has raised the prospect of a surge of first-time voters on Election Day, but it remains hotly disputed whether their ballots will alter the outcome of the presidential election.
This year’s surge of new registrants appears driven by voters’ increasing sense that the stakes are high in the Nov. 2 contest – following a historically tight 2000 presidential race, a controversial war and a polarizing presidency.
The deluge of new registrations – abetted by the candidates, parties and independent political groups – has been so great in some states that election officials say they will need every day before the election to assemble voter rolls.
In hotly contested Iowa and Missouri, only a tiny fraction of eligible citizens remain unregistered. The ultimate battleground four years ago, Florida, has seen a net increase of 1.5 million registrants – a four-year hike of nearly 18 percent that brings the total of the state’s voting rolls to 10.3 million.
Both parties have gained ground in most of the hard-fought states that are expected to determine November’s winner, with Democrats making gains in more key states than Republicans in those cases for which figures are available.
The political significance of the new registrations remains obscure, however, because some of the biggest growth has been in independent voters and because party loyalties remain unknown in two critical Midwest swing states – Ohio and Wisconsin.
Nationwide, at least two polls in the last week showed that newly registered voters favor Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry by double-digit margins. The Massachusetts senator holds an even greater lead, the polls found, among voters 29 and younger, many of whom will be voting for the first time.
Democratic strategists cautiously postulate that there exists an even greater Kerry vote “hidden” among young and new voters who pollsters aren’t reaching. But President Bush’s campaign manager dismissed many of the opposition’s registration gains as inflated.
The significance
It has been a truism of U.S. politics for generations that new and young voters tend to diminish in significance when it’s time to go to the polls. The percentage of young registered voters who actually cast ballots has slipped steadily in recent times. It hit a low in 2000, when just 15 percent of the electorate was 29 or younger, according to a Los Angeles Times exit poll.
Asked about the chances that newly registered voters would prove key to winning an election, Democratic political strategist James Carville once said: “You know what they call a candidate who’s counting on a lot of new voters? A loser.”
Yet this year’s campaign has played out against a backdrop of unparalleled events, most obviously the 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war in Iraq.
It also follows a 2000 election that showed a small number of votes really could decide who wins the presidency. Aside from the nationally spotlighted Florida contest four years ago, margins of a few hundred or few thousand votes determined the outcome in Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon and Wisconsin.
Some voters in 2000 complained they could find little difference between Bush and his Democratic foe, then-Vice President Al Gore. That lament is mostly absent this time around.
“The interest level is higher because of the polarization,” said Brian Sanderoff, a pollster based in Albuquerque, one of the narrowing number of battleground states. “Even young people now see a real difference among the candidates.”
The younger vote
Curtis Gans, director of the Washington, D.C.,-based Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, predicts that turnout by 18 to 24 year old voters will reach or exceed the 40.7 percent level it did in 1992, when the candidacy of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and billionaire independent Ross Perot galvanized many young people. By contrast, the 2000 election saw only 32.9 percent of eligible voters in that age group went to the polls. Some analysts think that it’s more than weighty issues of war and jobs that has engaged 20-somethings this year.
Jack Doppelt, a Northwestern University journalism professor and co-author of the 1999 book “Nonvoters: America’s No-Shows,” believes many young voters will turn out because of the “entertainment part of the common brain.”
Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” the Michael Moore film “Fahrenheit 9/11” and musical tours, such as Rock Against Bush, have made this year’s campaign part of the cultural currency for young people more than at any time in the recent past, Doppelt said.
Battleground states
As the presidential campaign reaches its final days, at least 10 states appear headed for close finishes. As a result, voter registration figures in those states are receiving extra attention.
In Florida, Republicans added 462,254 voters over the last four years, 4,000 more than Democrats. But Democrats still hold a 3.6 percent registration edge in the state.
More significant, the ranks of independent voters grew more than those of either of the major parties, with more than half a million additional Floridians declining to name a party, compared with four years ago.
In the two other biggest battlegrounds, Pennsylvania and Ohio, the winner of the registration battle remains muddled. Although the addition of 85,000 mostly Democratic voters in Philadelphia is a boon to Kerry, registrations in the rest of the state won’t be totaled until later this week.
Ohio voters don’t specify a party when they register. And each side is insisting they’ve made large gains in new voters in their strongholds in the state.
The picture seems clearer in some smaller battleground states.
In New Mexico, Democrats extended their registration advantage over Republicans to about 19 percentage points. But as in Florida, the largest gains were among independents, who now make up 14 percent of the state’s electorate.
In Iowa, Republicans retained their registration lead, but by just more than 8,000 instead of the 22,000 lead they held in 2000. Independents easily outnumber both parties in the Hawkeye State, totaling more than 39 percent of registered voters.
In Nevada, Democrats pushed ahead of GOP registrants, but by just more than 1,000. Republicans gained the clearest advantage in Colorado, where their increase outstripped the Democrats by more than 20,000, leaving the GOP with a nearly 6 percentage point registration advantage.
Registration margins suggest possible openings, but both sides acknowledged that the key will be delivering their new voters to the polls.
New voters
The count: An Associated Press analysis shows that the Democrats appear to be signing up more new voters than the Republicans are in Arizona, Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada and New Hampshire. In Florida, the two appear roughly even, based on data from half the state’s counties.
The next step: Get the newly registered voters to actually go to the polls. New voters often are less likely than longtime registered voters to cast a ballot.
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