California Political Party Registration

The state of California has released voter registration for 60 days before the election. I’m sure you will see lots of articles that talk about “The GOP's fade to irrelevance in California,” talking about how California has recently become impossible for Republicans, even though it’s been that way since 1970.

Rather than just read the nonsense that the idiots brilliant analysts give us, let’s look at the numbers.

Republicans
The Republican party registration has dropped by 7,051 since January. While there’s nothing good about a drop, taken over a year that’d be a drop of 28,200 for the year. In the last four years, they’ve dropped 43,000, 32,000, 48,000 and 140,000. So while it doesn’t reverse a trend it’s not all that alarming.

It doesn’t appear that people are registering Republican for the Presidential primary. This could be because they don’t like the Republican party or they just assumed the California primary wouldn’t matter. Which it won’t.

Democrats
As we all know California is trending fast to the left. And to show how that’s happening we can see that Democrats lost 20,800 registered voters since January, 3 times what the GOP lost. That’s 0.28% of their voters, double Republicans loss of 0.14% of theirs. The gap between the parties has gone from 13.3% to 13.2%. So there you go. Nothing says a party is gaining popularity better than losing registrants at a fast pace, because we all know that they’re leaving the Democratic party because they love it and intend to vote Democratic the rest of their lives.

Of course this isn’t shocking, because it reflects what’s been happening since 2009 and what’s happened since 1976. Since 1976, Democratic registration has fallen from 57.4% to 43.6% in the state.

When we look at competitive districts, we get an interesting story.

While the competitive districts were a mixed bag from February 2011-January 2012, the competitive districts, for the most part, moved decidedly rightward from January 2012-April 2012. Some of them substantially so.

CA-9 showed a Democratic drop of 0.7% and a Republican increase of 0.8%. Democratic registration advantage has dropped from 9.5% to 7.5% in the last year. Democrats had a 0.8% registration advantage in CA-7 last year, but now have less registered Democrats than registered Republicans. Four of the top five districts trending Republican are the four most northern competitive districts. This could be positive in a number of districts Republicans were concerned about.

The registration changes don’t bode well for the GOP in CA-31, 41, and 47, all of which are big concerns. The changes in CA-21 and 36 should worry Republicans less due to their relative strength there.

Democrats need to hope that this massive rightward shift in some of the biggest battleground districts is a fluke. Losing roughly 1% in some of these in only 3 months would be a bad trend with 7 more months to go before the election.