The Democrats' Daunting Digits
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Numbers -- like hips -- don't lie.
In a political world increasingly dominated by spin and increasingly dismissive of substance, it's important from time to time to remember that, for all the back-and-forth, sometimes the numbers are the numbers.
The Fix was reminded of this late last week when we got our hands on a document detailing the massive state-by-state voter-registration gains scored by Democrats between the last presidential election and this one. The memo, which was produced by the Atlas Project, a Democratic research and analysis firm, and obtained late last week by The Fix, provided a bunch of eye-opening facts and figures.
To wit:
· In the 13 battleground states that require voters to register by party, there are nearly 1.5 million more Democrats than at this time in 2004. The comparable Republican numbers, by contrast, have fallen by 61,000 during that time.
· Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by more than 3.3 million in these same 13 battleground states, roughly double the edge -- 1.8 million -- they enjoyed over the GOP four years ago.
· In the 10 battleground states without voter registration by party, total registration has risen by 1.4 million between 2004 and 2008.
· In Florida, there are almost 400,000 more registered Democrats today than in 2004, while Republican registrants have grown by less than 150,000 in that same time. In Pennsylvania, Democratic registration has increased by more than 430,000 since 2004 while GOP registration has gone up by 175,000. And in North Carolina, Democrats have added nearly 175,000 new voters, compared with just under 61,000 for Republicans.
