California Registration Report

The California Secretary of State issues party registration reports 5 times during even numbered years with general elections but only one in odd numbered years. That report, issued in February, isn’t very telling, since it comes out less than 3 months after the previous report and soon after a general election. The parties don’t do registration drives and there’s no urgency to register. Orange County used this as an opportunity to purge their voter rolls of people who were no longer voting.

Overall, voter registration declined by 190k, although that was largely due to Orange County. If you exclude that county, voter registration increased by 93k voters. In the 45 days between the last two registration reports in 2012, registration increased by almost a million voters. So the change was too small to mean much and it’s far enough away from an election that it doesn’t matter. So any information in here isn’t very meaningful.

That said, the report is certainly positive for Democrats. Their registration, outside of Orange County, went up by about 55k voters, while the Republicans declined by 21k. The NPP voters went up by 54k. It’s unknown how many of these are purged inactive voters, voters who moved, new registrants, or those that changed registration. Keep in mind that these are net figures. There were congressional districts where Republican registration increased.

I’m not going to get into a district by district analysis, because the changes are rather small and don’t mean much this far from an election. In the battleground CA-52 the Republican registration advantage went from 1.8% to 1.7%. In CA-7 the Democratic registration advantage went from 1.4% to 1.7%. That's not going to mean much in 19 months.

The February 2009 report showed an increase in the Democratic advantage over the October 2008 report. Subsequent reports in 2010, 2011, and 2012 had that margin drop slowly. They reversed that with the massive jump in the final report due to online registration.

If you’re a Democrat, there are no negatives here after last October’s big gains. If you’re a Republican, you can say that the change is meaningless.