With all of the discussion of a mid-cycle census and a fight brewing over a proposed mid-cycle reapportionment, much attention has focused on the flight of conservatives and moderates from blue states to red states. And for good reason; even if Donald Trump can’t get an extraordinary Enumeration before the regular census in 2030, blue states will lose significant representation in Congress by 2033. California and New York will likely lose four House seats each by the 2030 census, and other blue states could lose up to a half-dozen or more. Americans have spent the last several years literally voting with their feet, and the bill will come due soon.
That is not the only method of flight from the Democrat Party, however. The New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher did a deep dive into the trends of partisan affiliation, partnering with data firm L2 to determine those ebbs and flows. (Full disclosure: L2 partnered with me on my book Going Red gratis and allowed me to use their powerful database.) If Goldmacher’s data is accurate, the census may be the least of Democrat worries.
They are in the middle of a bleed-out that may have no end in sight. They are losing ground in literally every corner of the country:
The stampede away from the Democratic Party is occurring in battleground states, the bluest states and the reddest states, too, according to a new analysis of voter registration data by The New York Times. The analysis used voter registration data compiled by L2, a nonpartisan data firm.
Few measurements reflect the luster of a political party’s brand more clearly than the choice by voters to identify with it — whether they register on a clipboard in a supermarket parking lot, at the Department of Motor Vehicles or in the comfort of their own home.
And fewer and fewer Americans are choosing to be Democrats.
In fact, for the first time since 2018, more new voters nationwide chose to be Republicans than Democrats last year.
All told, Democrats lost about 2.1 million registered voters between the 2020 and 2024 elections in the 30 states, along with Washington, D.C., that allow people to register with a political party. (In the remaining 20 states, voters do not register with a political party.) Republicans gained 2.4 million.
Nominally, Democrats still have an overall registration advantage, but that’s mainly a mirage, as Goldmacher points out. Blue states like California have partisan registrations, while Texas and a handful of other red states do not. Their advantage in partisan-registration states has been cut in half in the last four years, and even in those states, the trends away from the Democrats are accelerating.
Just how bad has it gotten? Goldmacher laid out the data in a Twitter thread:
- PA: Dems +517K in 2020, +53K in 2024
- NC: Dems +400K in 2020, +17K in 2024
- Voters under 45: Dems 68% in 2018, 48% in 2024
- Dems share of indies in elections: 63% in 2018, 48% in 2024
What happened? Likely several factors have a role in this death spiral. Democrats spent the last decade focused on one man — Trump — as its agenda. That worked for them in the 2018 midterms, but blew up in their faces when the Russia-collusion allegations turned out to be nothing more than a hoax built on a dirty trick. Democrats spent four years covering up Joe Biden’s senility and unfitness for office, while simultaneously claiming that they were defending democracy. They anointed Kamala Harris as the nominee when their fraud got exposed in the debate, who refused to engage with the media and who argued that voters owed her the office as the only legitimate nominee in the race.
More likely, though, the damage comes from Democrats’ refusal to listen to voters. To some extent, this is also a result of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which basically forces them to automatically reject any position or action Trump takes as “fascism.” This month, that took the form of defending criminals over better law enforcement in Washington DC, but that’s not the first time Democrats have embraced 20% positions as a knee-jerk reaction to Trump. The Harvard-Harris CAPS poll series has made that disconnect painfully clear all year long.
How many of these issues have Democrats deliberately positioned themselves on the fringe?
Not only do Democrats ignore the popular support for these positions, they refuse to offer any rational policy proposals to deal with these issues. They spent four years arguing that the problem with immigration was a lack of legislation; Trump proved them wrong within weeks. Their response? They’re still flogging the same bill that Biden and Harris insisted would allow them to alleviate the problem — even after Trump simply used existing law to solve it altogether.
Voters have a funny way of dealing with politicians who refuse to listen to the electorate. Republicans discovered that in 2015, learned the lesson, and adapted. Democrats refuse to listen to voters and appear incapable of adapting. And now that Trump has cut off their access to NGO funding through USAID, even their structural advantages are disappearing, as Goldmacher hints:
For years, the left has relied on a sprawling network of nonprofits — which solicit donations from people whose identities they need not disclose — to register Black, Latino and younger voters. Though the groups are technically nonpartisan, the underlying assumption has been that most new voters registering would vote Democratic.
As long as Democrats refuse to listen to voters, that assumption is in serious error. Now they won’t even get their indirect government funding through USAID, which levels the playing field for the first time in decades. Their leadership is too soft and insular to compete without those advantages. The chickens are coming home to roost, in other words, or more accurately, they’re going elsewhere to roost, and Democrats have no tools or skills to deal with it.
Editor’s Note: President Trump is leading America into the “Golden Age” as Democrats try desperately to stop it. The harder they try, the harder we push back — and as the NYT reports today, it’s working.
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