Boom in voter registration favors Dems, could lead Obama to election win _ if they turn out

Boom in voter registration favors Dems, could lead Obama to election win _ if they turn out
By WHITNEY WOODWARD and MIKE BAKER
Associated Press Writers

12:02 PM PDT, October 9, 2008

JACKSONVILLE, N.C. (AP) _ The surge in new voters that helped propel Barack Obama to his party's presidential nomination is carrying over to the general election — 9 million newly registered voters who are overwhelmingly Democratic and could add up to a big victory on Election Day.

If they show up.

In states where registration is recorded by party, including eight key states that could decide the election, voters have signed up Democratic in the past six months by a margin of nearly 4-to-1.

Tonya Barker is among them. The 30-year-old mother of two from eastern North Carolina said it wasn't until this election — when the Illinois senator burst onto the national scene — that she finally found a reason to vote.

"Why would I waste my time on someone I don't believe in?" said Barker. "I think I knew Barack was coming."

Simply registering voters, even when the numbers are skewed so heavily toward one party, is no guarantee of success.

Historically, voter turnout among new registrants has been low. And while candidates have months to run registration drives, they have only a tiny window — several days during early balloting, just hours on Election Day — to get out the vote.

Still, an Associated Press analysis of registration data found that if the millions of newly registered voters turn out at the same rate as in 2004 and cast ballots with their declared party of choice, Obama could have the votes he needs to wrest several battleground states away from the Republican Party and its nominee, Sen. John McCain.

Obama could hold Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, won by Democrat John Kerry four years ago, and go on to pick up three states won by President Bush: Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. He could also narrow the gap in Iowa, as well as in both Florida and North Carolina: two big Southern states worth 42 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.

A win for Obama in only a few of those eight states could doom McCain's chances. A victory in all could turn the election into a rout.

"The trend line is really troubling," said longtime Republican consultant Carter Wrenn, who helped North Carolina's Jesse Helms win several terms in the U.S. Senate in a state where there are far more registered Democrats than Republicans.

"That's a sign that this is one of those elections where all the tides are flowing in the Democrats' direction. Those tides are the most important thing in politics."

An AP survey of election officials nationwide found that as of Oct. 1, the number of registered Democrats had grown by nearly 5 percent since 2004 — outpacing overall population growth in the 28 states where information on voter registration by party was available for 2004 and 2008. During the same time, the GOP lost more than 2 percent of its registered voters.

Within the numbers are unmistakable signs that Obama stands to reap the benefits of the registration boom.

Among them: In five states that track registration by race, blacks — who polls suggest almost unanimously support Obama — have registered to vote at nearly twice the rate of whites over the past six months.

"It had a lot to do with negligence on my part, not taking interest in it," Natalie Mattocks, a 26-year-old woman from Jacksonville, said of her previous indifference to voting. She signed up this summer as a Democrat. "Now with an African-American candidate, there's kind of an automatic level of interest for me," said Mattocks, who is black.

And she said she has been adamant that her friends vote, too.

"I'm on them," Mattocks said. "It's become very important for me to make sure they're registered. I'm telling everyone I come across, no matter if I don't know them and they don't know me. They can see it on my shirt, who I'm voting for."

In the eight battleground states where voters register by party, Democrats have added more than 1 million registrants in the past four years — while the GOP has lost roughly 125,000.

In six of the eight, more voters also have recently registered as independents or as members of third parties than as Republicans. Since the start of the year in Florida, 253,294 people have signed up as independents or with other parties, compared to 190,137 Republicans.

Meanwhile, 360,478 Florida voters registered as Democrats.

"The real question is, can the Democrats turn these voters out?" said Erin Van Sickle, a spokeswoman for the Florida Republican Party. "History tells us: No, they can't. Republicans have a time-tested get-out-the-vote machine and that will not change this year."

Four years ago, there were a few thousand more registered Republicans than Democrats in Nevada. Thanks in part to a competitive Democratic caucus between Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the party now has a roughly 90,000-voter edge. Even if a large portion of those new Democrats don't vote, Obama has enough potential new voters to make up the 21,500 vote edge that delivered the state's five electoral votes to Bush in '04.

Said Dan Hart, a Democratic political consultant in Nevada: "If we've got a registration advantage of that size, and independents are leaning Democratic ... there's a point in time when you just don't have enough voters to win an election."

Steve Wark, a Republican consultant from Las Vegas and an expert on getting out the vote, acknowledged he'd rather be on the other side of the registration surge. But he said getting first-time registrants to the polls is especially hard in Nevada, where the population is transient and often new to the state.

"In southern Nevada, you can count on 20 percent of any new registrants to vote in the next regular election," Wark said. "It's very difficult when you do registration drives to make those meaningful within an election cycle."

Among the new voters in Nevada are tens of thousands signed up by Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a group that works to register low-income people. Officials there and in other states have accused ACORN, which claims to have registered 1.3 million people nationwide since 2007, of submitting registrations that used false or duplicated information.

ACORN has said it informs election authorities when it identifies a potentially fraudulent registration, and said the relatively few number of problem registrations probably stem from workers — who are paid by the number of registrations they submit — making up false applications, rather than trying to change the outcome of the election.

The lingering nomination fight between Clinton and Obama turned the late-season primaries in Pennsylvania and North Carolina into critical contests, generating enthusiasm and booming registration.

The ranks of registered Democrats has grown by 500,000 in the past year in Pennsylvania, while the GOP has lost about 28,000. The state's 67 counties are still processing the crush of paperwork filed before this week's registration deadline.

Thomas Baldino, a political science professor at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., said many of the registrants recruited by the Obama campaign are college students and other young people. He cautioned that such people are less likely to vote than older, established voters for whom heading out on Election Day is a habit.

"(Obama) needs to mobilize those people," Baldino said. "He needs to turn those numbers into votes."

The registration trend favoring Democrats is dramatic in North Carolina, a state that hasn't voted for that party's nominee since Gov. Jimmy Carter from nearby Georgia was on the ballot in 1976. New Democratic registrations outpaced those for the GOP 2-to-1 this year.

Billy Mills, the Democratic Party chairman in North Carolina's Onslow County, was thrilled this week when Michelle Obama arrived to speak to about 1,500 military families who live near Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps' main base on the East Coast. This will be the first election for thousand of Marines stationed there, where the average age is 23.

"I'd say the older forces of the county, the retirees, they're still Republican," Mills said. "But there's a lot of younger folks that see it differently and that have registered Democratic as a result of their interest in Obama. This has been the biggest movement that I've seen in a long time."

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The Associated Press' Election Research and Quality Control Group in New York, and writers Kathleen Hennessey in Las Vegas, Peter Jackson in Harrisburg, Pa., and Brent Kallestad in Tallahassee, Fla., contributed to this report.