Democrats are losing ground big time
In a span of four years – from 2020 to 2024 – Democrats lost 2.1 million registered voters in the 30 states where registration by party takes place. This includes Pennsylvania.
In the six years from 2018 to 2024, the Republican percentage of new voters rose by 9% while Democrats fell 8%, a swing of 17 percentage points in these 30 laboratories of democracy.
In 2018, during the first Trump administration, Democrats accounted for 66% of all new voters in the 30 states. By 2024, the slice of new Democratic registrants had plummeted to 48%. Which means: Republicans had gone from a third of new voters in 2018 to 52%, a majority, in 2024.
In November 2020, Pennsylvania Democrats enjoyed a registration advantage over Republicans of better than half a million voters. The precise number was 517,210. As of this summer, their lead had been sliced to a razor thin 52,303.
These figures come from a recent analysis by New York Times reporters Shane Goldmacher and Jonah Smith.
Goldmacher and Smith use the words “hemorrhaging” and “serious erosion” to describe what’s happening to the Democratic party. They offered up a quote from election analyst Michael Pruser. “I don’t want to say, ‘The death cycle of the Democratic Party,’ but there seems no end to this,” Pruser told them.
“There is no silver lining…. This is month after month, year after year…. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
And yet … Republicans and Democrats have risen from near death experiences not just once but on multiple occasions. In 1964, Democrats led by Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater and congressional Republicans. Eight years later, Richard Nixon rolled to a historic victory.
Ronald Reagan fashioned an era of Republican hegemony until he didn’t.
Before Donald Trump came along, Republicans appeared to be going nowhere. The Obama coalition, consisting of black and Hispanic voters, young people and women, urban liberals, and suburban moderates, appeared firmly entrenched for years to come.
One of the beauties of the American way of politics is that things are hardly ever frozen in place for long. The tendency is for factions, blocs, movements, alliances to form, dissolve, coalesce, and fall apart again with some regularity.
But the parties have to work at it. There’s no standing still in politics. At least there shouldn’t be. Politicians are slippery more by necessity than choice.
Slippery or not, two recent examples of Democratic politicians catching the political drift of things are John Fetterman and Gavin Newsom.
Until recently, Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s 6-8 sweatshirted senior U.S. senator, appeared to have feet made of political clay. A visit to Mar-a-Lago soon after the election unnerved state and national Democrats.
Democrats were later dismayed by Fetterman’s flirtation with several of Trump’s cabinet choices. His criticism of Biden administration shortcomings at the border added to their disquiet. This was followed by talk that the eccentric former mayor of Braddock might bolt to the Republicans.
Based on recent fundraising emails, it’s apparent that Fetterman is standing firm. The senator’s social media barrage against Trump spans the wide frontier of Democratic talking points: from the Republican “Big, Ugly Bill” and cuts to Medicaid and VA funding to support for federal workers and unions.
“Republicans do not care,” one Fetterman post proclaims.
Fetterman still advances a willingness to work with Republicans in and out of the administration. Considering recent voter registration trends in Pennsylvania, an occasional hands across the aisle approach is not a bad idea – not a bad idea at all.
Meanwhile, California governor Newsom has taken to trolling Trump on social media, leading the fight over congressional redistricting instigated by Trump and Texas Republicans, and backpedaling on such triggering issues for some Democrats as transgender rights.
Newsom hopes to be president. He can only do this by resisting both Trump and the far-left of his own party.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.