Democrats lose 2.1 MILLION voters as registration plummets across US

The Democratic Party is facing steep losses in registered voters across the United States, with the 30 states that track registration by political party revealing that the party lost ground to the GOP in every one of those states between 2020 and 2024. 

A report from the New York Times, citing data compiled by the nonpartisan data firm L2, revealed that the Democratic Party lost around 2.1 million voters between 2020 and 2024 across 30 states and the District of Columbia, while Republicans gained 2.4 million. 2024 marked the first time since 2018 that Republicans outpaced Democrats in terms of new voter registrations nationwide.

While there are still more Democrats registered in America, the party went from having an 11-point lead over the GOP on Election Day 2020 in those states with party registration to a 6-point lead in 2024.

Michael Pruser of Decision Desk HQ told the outlet, "I don’t want to say, ‘The death cycle of the Democratic Party,’ but there seems to be no end to this. There is no silver lining or cavalry coming across the hill. This is month after month, year after year."

Significant Democratic losses were seen in the battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. In the latter state, "Republicans erased roughly 95 percent of the registration advantage that Democrats held in the fall of 2020," per the outlet. Nevada saw the steepest drop in any state other than West Virginia. 

Maria Cardona, a member of the Democratic National Committee, told the outlet, "We fell asleep at the switch."

Tom Bonier, a leading expert on voter registration trends in the Democratic Party, had spent 2024 disregarding the seriousness of the situation the party was in in regard to registration. "I was wrong," he said. "Clearly, in retrospect, we can say the Democratic Party had dug itself in too deep a hole in the preceding four years for the Harris campaign to dig itself out in the last few months," he said, adding that the registration statistics are a "big flashing red alert."

Florida has seen Republican registrations outpace Democrat ones, with Miami-Dade County flipping red in the months following Trump being the first Republican to win the county in decades. In 2020, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 200,000. The number of Democratic voters in North Carolina is ahead of Republicans by less than 17,000, down from 400,000 four years ago. Pennsylvania Democrats have gone from having a 517,310 advantage in November 2020 to just 53,505 voters over the summer.  

Democrats have seen a slump among new, young voters. In 2018, the party accounted for 66 percent of all new voters under the age of 45. This dropped to 48 percent in 2024. Among new male voters, 49 percent chose the Democratic Party in 2020, but that was down to 39 percent in 2024.