Trump's voter registration advantage over Biden may play out on Election Day

WASHINGTON (Sinclair Broadcast Group) — Former Vice President Joe Biden may have an eight-point lead over President Donald Trump in national polls, but there seems to be one place where the Trump campaign has an advantage over Democrats: voter registration.

With just two weeks until the election, Republicans are seeing a surge in voter registration in the battleground states of Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida. Republicans have out-registered Democrats in those states by about 445,000 to 224,000 since the primaries, with an aggressive push since August. It marks the first time since 2004 that more Republicans than Democrats have registered to vote in the final months of an election.

Republicans have never had a registration advantage over Democrats in Florida. This year they have narrowed their lead, leaving Democrats with 136,000 more registered voters, nearly half of what they had in 2016 and the smallest gap that has existed between the parties in more than 40 years.

In three months, Republicans registered 30,000 more Arizona voters than Democrats, a state that already has a 97,000-person GOP advantage. In North Carolina, Republicans signed up 28,774 more voters than Democrats, eating into their partisan advantage by more than half. In Pennsylvania, which Trump won in 2016 by 44,000 votes, Republicans eroded the Democratic advantage by 24%. In the last three months, Republicans registered 71,922 more Pennsylvania voters than Democrats.

In Florida, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Democrats made up a smaller share of new registrants during this election cycle, according to a study by the Democratic data firm TargetSmart.

That's making the Trump campaign optimistic. In a call with reporters last week, campaign manager Bill Stepien said the registration trends "put the president's party in a much stronger position than it was four years ago."

Partisan voter registration numbers also don't tell the full story. In an interview with NPR, David Wasserman of The Cook Political Report argued the Republicans' registration numbers were a "drop in the bucket compared to Biden's lead in the national polls."

Voter registration is a difficult metric to interpret. That's partly because more voters register as independents and have shifted away from identifying with either political party. That is especially true of young voters. According to a 2020 surveyof young voters, 44% of those under the age of 25 identified as independent, though they overwhelmingly disapprove of President Trump.

The growing share of independent voters "has the effect of narrowing Democrats' historical registration advantage without necessarily giving Trump new votes," Wasserman noted.

However, there are indications that partisan voter registration could help predict the election winner in close states.

In a note to investors earlier this month, JP Morgan analyst Marko Kolanovic tracked the historical relationship between changes in voter registration and election outcomes. Assuming that "if more voters register for a party, that they will also vote for that party," Kolanovic found that the change of voter registration was a"significant variable" in predicting election outcomes.

If the historical trends play out, that could mean a Trump victory in several battleground states, including Pennsylvania, where Republicans picked up 135,600 voters since June compared to 58,000 Democratic voters. At the very least, it suggests a closer race than many pollsters have predicted.

Republicans' outperformance in voter registration is strongly tied to the coronavirus pandemic, which led to a dramatic drop in traditional campaign activities, including registration. After an explosive start to 2020, voter registration during the spring dropped below one-third of 2016 levels, according to the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Voter registration stations at college campuses evaporated as schools closed. Concerts, festivals, sporting events were canceled and stay-at-home orders made face-to-face campaigning near impossible for public health reasons. The pandemic disrupted operations at state Departments of Motor Vehicles, where 45% of voters submitted registrations in 2016.

Democrats, who had otherwise been outpacing Republicans in voter registration efforts throughout much of the Trump presidency, were hit hardest by the coronavirus restrictions, according to TargetSmart.

Democrats also spent months of the campaign on the sidelines. The Biden campaign suspended door-knocking and avoided most in-person campaigning citing public health concerns. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign continued to knock on doors, register voters and hold massive rallies criticized by public health officials.

The Democratic National Committee accused the Trump campaign of "risking the lives of their staff, the lives of voters" to continue its grassroots activities in the middle of a pandemic. At the beginning of October, Democrats announced they were sending hundreds of volunteers to resume door-knocking in battleground states.

Those lost opportunities will have an impact on Democratic voters, explained Kris Parker, a Florida Democratic strategist and attorney at Hendry & Parker.

"The Biden's campaign's decision to lay off in-person voter registration and door-to-door canvassing, while meritorious during a pandemic, will undoubtedly have an effect on Democratic turnout," Parker said.

They may be able to make up ground with their pivot to phone calls, texts and emails to mobilize voters. However, "it is a commonly held belief that there is no substitution for in-person voter contact," he added.

During the 2020 election cycle, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee made 133 million voter contacts. In the first week of October, Trump volunteers knocked on 2.8 million doors and they plan to bank 1 million phone calls every day until Nov. 3. The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for similar statistics.

"More than any dollar that you spend, you cannot underestimate the value of interpersonal communication," said Jonathan Jakubowski, the chairman of the Wood County, Ohio GOP and author of "Bellwether Blues." He added that the trends in voter registration were "more predictive than the polling," which inaccurately predicted a Democratic victory in 2016 and are forecasting a similar result this year.

Texas GOP strategist Vlad Davidiuk equated registration success with voter enthusiasm around the party. "It's significant when one party has voter registration operations that outperform the other party," he said. "It's usually a pretty reliable indicator of effective ground operation and supporter enthusiasm," he continued, noting both are critical in an election where record-high turnout is expected.

On the other side, however, Democrats still have a lead over Republicans in registered voters in the key states of Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Democrats are also measuring enthusiasm in the massive volume of returned early ballots. As of Tuesday, more than 35 million people cast ballots or voted early. According to an NBC report, the largest portion of returned ballots were from Democrat-affiliated voters.

While voter registration has ended in most states, there is still time to register in some parts of the country. Twenty-one states and Washington, D.C. have same-day voter registration.