Well, Monday morning is not getting off to a good start and this is after a lousy weekend, post-Roe. The Associated Press is reporting that tens of thousands of suburban swing voters across the country, that helped defeat Donald Trump and fuel other Democratic gains, are now switching back their registration to Republican. This is not good. This is a freaking five alarm fire.
More than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party over the last year, according to voter registration data analyzed by The Associated Press. The previously unreported number reflects a phenomenon that is playing out in virtually every region of the country — Democratic and Republican states along with cities and small towns — in the period since President Joe Biden replaced former President Donald Trump.
But nowhere is the shift more pronounced — and dangerous for Democrats — than in the suburbs, where well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump’s Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back. Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa. […]
But over the last year, roughly two-thirds of the 1.7 million voters who changed their party affiliation shifted to the Republican Party. In all, more than 1 million people became Republicans compared to about 630,000 who became Democrats.
The broad migration of more than 1 million voters, a small portion of the overall U.S. electorate, does not ensure widespread Republican success in the November midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress and dozens of governorships. Democrats are hoping the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to overrule Roe v. Wade will energize supporters, particularly in the suburbs, ahead of the midterms.
Still, the details about party switchers present a dire warning for Democrats who were already concerned about the macro effects shaping the political landscape this fall.
There are a few gigantic problems which the Democrats face: 1) Joe Biden has very bad polls, not through any malfeasance of his own so much as the tumultuous temper of the political times. He’s not responsible for the pandemic nor the war in Ukraine, but these things affect gas prices and inflation, things that he is continually blamed for.
2) Beyond Biden, we have no bench. And Biden himself said that he was “a bridge.” To what? This is the truly terrifying part. If anybody is thinking that Kamala Harris, who has worse approval ratings than Biden, is going to be the way forward for the party, I am sorry. I don’t think that’s a rational viewpoint to hold. I am not alone in that. Intelligencer:
Harris has never let anyone doubt that she expects Biden to seek a second term, and she has made no moves to set up a contingency campaign. She has effectively ceased to have contact with many of the highest-ranking advisers to her own 2020 bid. Yet if Biden did step aside, Harris would start the succession contest as the clear front-runner. A Politico newsletter recently pointed out that 27 surveys have tested the prospect of a Biden-free primary in the past year, and Harris has led 21 of them. (The remaining six were led by Michelle Obama, who is perhaps less likely to run than her constitutionally ineligible husband.) Underwater or not at the national level, Harris’s popularity among Black voters in particular may make her impossible to beat in a primary — which Biden, who won largely on the strength of his own relationship with Black voters, especially in South Carolina, knows as well as anyone.
How Biden regards Harris’s electability is informed by one of the richest psychodramas in Washington. No one is more sensitive to the subject of veep succession than Biden, after Obama essentially opted to support Hillary Clinton over his own VP in 2015. Biden still doesn’t like to talk about that experience, even privately; close observers can only guess whether he would find it appropriate to offer an outright endorsement to the ostensible carrier of his legacy if he were to step aside. Obama didn’t formally endorse during the 2016 primary, but behind the scenes, there was little ambiguity about his preference — and if anything, Biden could pointedly choose to do the opposite.
Most think Harris would win the nomination if Biden backed her, and no one thinks he would ever actively endorse anyone else. But to her doubters, that itself is reason to think that “Biden has to run again, because he desperately has to keep Trump out of the White House and defend our democracy,” as one Capitol Hill supporter puts it. “And I have no doubts Kamala Harris can’t win.” The inside-baseball gripes and anonymous knifing would be easier to shrug off if not for the flurry of sub-rosa activity elsewhere in the party, which suggests a potential Harris candidacy may not be intimidating enough to keep others away from 2024.
3) We have some terrifically gifted people, Elizabeth Warren being one, Pete Buttigieg being another. If Buttigieg didn’t have the “handicap” of being gay in a gay-hating society such as the one we live in, he would be somebody to look to for the future of the party.
Full disclosure: I was hoping that Biden would pick Elizabeth Warren to be his vice president, because in my opinion Warren is far stronger on articulating the Democratic point of view and arguing it persuasively. However, that didn’t happen, so I don’t know if Warren is viable as a presidential candidate should Biden step aside in 2024, or beyond in 2028.
We better start thinking seriously about all this, because the Republicans are. Ron DeSantis is the new golden boy. It’s just a question of 2024 or 2028.
And here’s a thought, call it oddball but it’s out there: There are people who think that Liz Cheney could get the GOP nomination in 2024 or maybe even 2028. Maybe Cheney would primary Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. There are even Democrats who are saying they would vote for Cheney and while I find that catastrophic thinking considering her horrific voting record, (including against Roe) it does speak to the massive approval that she is garnering due to her tireless efforts on the January 6 Committee.
Who knows who will be running in 2024? Short of The Shadow, nobody else knows, that’s for sure. What is known is that democracy is hanging by a thread and we better be thinking of a way to shore up our defenses, especially at the rate things are going downhill. The actions of the extremist Supreme Court coupled with this news of more people registering as Republicans than Democrats, coupled with the fact that we’re not even sure if our incumbent is running in the next presidential election are factors that all scream for our attention.
A million Democratic voters switch (back, in many cases) to GOP. Not good. But the article doesn’t say anything about voters switching to Democrats. According to CBS news, “In all, more than 1 million people became Republicans compared to about 630,000 who became Democrats,” for a net gain to the GOP of 370,000 votes. For example, there is reason to believe that lots of ethnic voters of Eastern European descent (not only Ukrainian-Americans), who normally vote GOP, are trending towards the Democrats. I don’t think this has been sufficiently studied:
“https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/02/what-ukrainian-american-voters-are-doing-to-gop-politics/
Not to mention that this analysis was done over the past 12 months, of which only the last 5 months coincide with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and none at all after the SCOTUS decision striking down Roe v Wade.
Ok, so twice as many people switched their registrations from Democratic to Republican as vice versa. I agree that’s disturbing. But hasn’t it ocurred to you that the whole situation is so disturbing that a whole lot of those people are switching registration not because they intend to vote Republican in the general election, but rather because they feel it important to vote against the trash Trump is endorsing in the primaries. If I lived in Wyoming, for instance, I might register Republican, just so I could vote in the primary for Liz Cheny, rather than her radical right wing opponents. Never in a million years will I ever vote for a Republican in the general election.
I was going to say the same thing. I am mostly registered as an Independent, but do register with a party in order to vote in the primaries (in my state Independents cannot vote in the primaries.) I wouldn’t assume that these newly registered Republicans will vote R in November.
I didn’t read the article but saw in the news feed of my home page a headline story from Fox about this. Frankly, the reason I dismissed it out of hand and am still not freaking out is pretty simple. I love you ursula but I think you’ve overlooked something here which is that we have PRIMARIES going on right now. We also know because there’s been ample reporting on it that coordinated efforts with real muscle behind them have been going on in various places around the country for people to TEMPORARILY register (or re-register) as Republicans to vote in GOP primaries. I’m pretty sure less organized efforts have gone on all over the country. In some cases it’s to try and push an out-and-out wackjob even Republicans won’t vote for on to the ballot, and in other cases to try and get a sane Republican over the line. Whatever.
The point is that I think it’s not only possible but likely that a lot of these million changed to GOP registration are only going to last for the primary season. And that even if these people don’t formally switch back to Independent when given the choice between some GOP asshole and a sane Democrat in the privacy of their voting booth they are going to make like it’s 2018. So don’t panic. Life and even history teaches us again and again that things might appear a certain way but reality is rather, even somewhat different than something appears on the surface. I think this will turn out to be one of those times.
Precisely, Denis! What incentive does anyone have to go back to Republican but to perform some internal sabotage? And ex-Republicans are even MORE convincing for such work.
Yep, have faith in some suburban wives and their equally pissed off husbands.
I find it difficult to believe all these suburban voters are dumber than a box of rocks. I could be wrong tho’. On the other hand, so could the AP.
I agree with Dennis. I had to switch from Democrat to Unaffiliated in order to vote in the primary for my district here in Utah. I’ll switch back after the 28th of this month. Yikes, tomorrow.
After seeing the article earlier I decided to do a little sleuthing. My state of CO allows independent voters to choose to vote in either party’s primary. And then one can vote for whomever in the general election. BUT that is not the case in every state, and it was not previously the case in CO either. When we moved here my husband and I specifically registered one as Dem and other as Rep so we would have at least one vote in the primary for each party, Independents could not vote in the primary at that time.
So I didn’t look at the breakdown according to which states were named in the article, I looked at how many states had the ability to vote in a primary if not previously registered with one of the two major parties.
There are quite a few states that do not allow that crossover to occur. Maybe, just maybe, there could be a fair number of voters that chose to change registration in order to “do the right thing”. Just trying to bring in a little beam of sunshine here.
This is a crap story. 630K switched to Dem. And the basis for the alarm is ONE GUY changing from Libertarian to R, five years ago.