A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post noted a possible silver lining to the Democrats’ longer-than-expected fight for the nomination: a boost in the number of registered Democratic voters, spurred by an exciting primary fight. Pennsylvania’s Department of State noted, for example, that Dems have now topped 4 million registered voters, “the first time either party in the state has crossed that threshold.”
USA Today notes a similar trend this morning in most of the states hosting upcoming Democratic contests.
Nominating a Democratic presidential candidate has become a marathon, but primary voters are going the distance: Voter registration is surging in six of the eight states with upcoming Democratic primaries — a sign that turnout could continue to break records.
The hard-fought Democratic nomination contest between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is making every primary critical. As a result, the late-voting states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky and Oregon have seen a boost in voter registration, state officials say.
Oregon, for example, saw 28,000 new voters register in January and February, and expects 25,000 more before the end of the month. In North Carolina, 165,449 new voters have registered since Jan. 1, and three-quarters of them are eligible to vote in the May 6 Democratic primary. Some states are seeing voters switch registration just so they can weigh in on the Clinton-Obama competition.
Finally, a silver lining to a prolonged and awkward intra-party fight?
Not necessarily.
Jonathan Chait argues today:
Some have gamely insisted that a long campaign actually helps the Democrats, as evidenced by high primary turnout and new voter registration in states like Pennsylvania. But, to believe this argument, you’d have to believe that many of the voters flocking to the primaries would otherwise not have voted in the general election — an absurdity, given that even the high Democratic primary turnout is a fraction of normal general election turnout. You’d have to ignore Obama’s foregone opportunities to start organizing nationally and making his general election pitch. And you’d have to explain away the fact that, in recent weeks, Obama has gone from leading McCain in the polls to trailing. (Clinton has trailed McCain for months; now her deficit is growing.)
For that matter, Noam Scheiber recently noted:
In order for [the increased registration numbers] to be much of a benefit, you’d have to show that the registration numbers wouldn’t be up if one candidate or the other had already locked up the nomination. Actually, you’d have to show more than that. You’d have to show that the registration numbers wouldn’t have ended up in the same place by November under either scenario. (For most states the general-election registration deadline is sometime in October.) I don’t think you can really make that case.
For one thing, if we had a nominee, that person would already be organizing a lot of states for the general. And all the evidence suggests he or she would be having a lot of success registering people as Democrats.
To be sure, the registration numbers are encouraging; it’s just probably not a compelling reason, in and of itself, to keep the race for the Democratic nomination going.