The Boston Globe
Saturday 12 April 2008
Democrats' battle lures many from GOP.
More than half a million people have registered to vote or switched registrations this year to get their say in upcoming Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Indiana - the latest indication of heavy voter interest and enthusiasm in the 2008 presidential campaign.
As the nomination battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton stretches through the spring, the three states are suddenly at the epicenter of a race that many predicted would be resolved by now. Pennsylvania votes a week from Tuesday; North Carolina and Indiana head to the polls on May 6.
Registrations in all three states - which are competitive between the two senators - have surged this year as it has become clear that voters in those states may well determine the Democratic nominee.
"There's more interest in the primary among the citizens here than any time in the last 40 years," said Edward Carmines, a political scientist at Indiana University.
The spike in voter activity reflects a defining trend of this election.
Voter turnout in one Democratic contest after another has smashed records and far surpassed Republican numbers, even though they, too, reached all-time highs in some states. And a significant number of Republicans have changed their registrations so they can vote in the Democratic race.
Obama makes the case that he is attracting droves of new voters - an argument backed by exit polls - and that positions him as the stronger Democratic candidate in November.
The tremendous interest among Democratic voters in this year's race - driven by the historic duel between Obama and Clinton and urgency among the rank-and-file to retake the White House - has been apparent from the first vote, the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, which drew a record 236,000 Democratic voters. That is about double the number that participated in 2004.
Jumps in voter registrations suggest that Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Indiana could be headed for record turnout, too.
Pennsylvania's Democratic primary, on April 22, is open only to registered Democrats. Since Jan. 1, more than 300,000 people have either completed new Democratic registrations or switched to the Democratic Party to be able to vote, about a total 8 percent increase, according to state election statistics. About half of new Democratic registrations were processed in the last two weeks of March, right at the deadline.
Pennsylvania now has about 4.2 million registered Democrats - roughly 289,000 more than were registered for the 2006 midterm election, and 205,000 more than were registered for the 2004 presidential contest. Enough new Democrats have been added to the rolls in traditionally GOP Bucks and Montgomery counties in suburban Philadelphia that each now has a higher number of registered Democrats than Republicans.
Republican Senator Arlen Specter said yesterday that he is glad he's not up for reelection this fall.
"I think it's very tough," he said on CNN. "They have turned many Republicans who were my voters. We're going to be working very hard to try to turn them back."
The May 6 Democratic primary in North Carolina, where traditional voter registration closed yesterday, is open to Democrats and unaffiliated voters. At least 122,000 of them have newly registered this year. As of last week, the number of black voters, among whom Obama has found overwhelming support throughout the primaries, had increased 34,000 from the end of 2007, or 3 percent; white voters were up about 66,000, or 1.5 percent.
The North Carolina figures do not give the complete picture of what the Democratic electorate will look like on Primary Day. Through a new, same-day registration law, voters can register and cast an early ballot between April 17 and May 3.
Indiana's Democratic primary, meanwhile, is open to all voters. State election officials reported after registration closed on Monday that about 150,000 new voters had signed up since Jan. 1, a 3.6 percent increase.
Increases in voter registration also helped drive record turnouts in prior contests, including in South Carolina, which recorded about 72,000 new registrations in the three months leading up to its Jan. 26 Democratic primary.
Some of the boost in Democratic registrations and turnout across the country has been the result of constant work by the campaigns. Aides and volunteers for Obama and Clinton have spent countless hours identifying first-time voters, helping them fill out registration documents, and delivering them to election officials.
Jonathan Swain, Clinton's communications director in Indiana, said staff members have been working for about three weeks, spending much of their time signing up voters before the registration deadline. He said they have tried to capitalize on the novelty of a competitive Indiana primary and on high-profile visits by Clinton, President Bill Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea.
"It's going to be won by getting our vote out," Swain said.
Obama's campaign believes that, too, and has also been diligently adding its supporters to the voting rolls. Mitch Stewart, Obama's state director in Indiana, said his operation focused on three tasks: sign up eligible students at high schools and colleges; scour lists of adults who had not yet registered; and blanket public areas with clipboard-wielding volunteers and staffers.
"We were outside gas stations, outside shopping malls, inside shopping malls, at the zoo - basically any public place we could," said Stewart, who was Obama's caucus director in Iowa.
Michael P. McDonald, a specialist on voting patterns at George Mason University in Virginia, said the surge in voter participation in the primaries and caucuses augurs an even higher turnout in November, when many more voters will tune in.
"This is an indication that we're going to see a very high turnout rate in the general election, perhaps as high as we haven't seen in a century in American politics," he said.
But Andrew Reynolds, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina, said he wonders whether all these new voters will stay engaged in politics after 2008.
"Let's say the outcome of the presidential election is not what they expect or hope for," he said. "Are they just going to be alienated and drip away again?"
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