In this brief window when my sister is looking after my newborn this morning, let’s have a discussion on voter enthusiasm, seen through the lens of voter registration.
A big question on my own mind was how much Kamala Harris’s entrance in the race would affect voter enthusiasm. You can take polls, but that’s always a bit fuzzy and these days politicized. Or you can look at hard data, which is something I prefer.
Tom Bonier is a Democratic consultant and senior advisor at TargetSmart, which is a data outfit that is left-leaning but absolutely nailed the numbers in 2022 and predicted no red wave by looking at things like voter registration post-Dobbs. Yesterday, Bonier was out with some interesting numbers in the key state of North Carolina, which really wasn’t as big a factor until Harris became the nominee.
North Carolina is one of the states that provides great information and party-level breakdowns among new voter registrations. It also happens to be a competitive swing state. In the week following her announcement, voter registrations in NC rose, as expected, compared to the same week four years earlier in 2020. (Best to compare apples to apples!)
One surprising thing, however, was the amount that the numbers rose. In 2020, there were 12,464 new registrations in North Carolina, but in 2024 there were 17,178. That’s around a 50 percent increase. And remember, these days elections are won by a few thousand votes in the swing states.
Perhaps more important than how many people are registering is the question of who is registering. In North Carolina, the good news is that the surge is being driven by new women registrants, who are breaking heavily for Harris. The gender gap between men and women increased from +6 women in 2020 to a whopping +12 women in 2024. (The “gap” is the percent difference between men and women, so a +6 gap would be around 53 / 47 ignoring all decline-to-states, while a +12 would be around 56 / 44.)
Okay, but sure. Harris is a woman candidate, so women are naturally going to be more excited to organize to vote for her, right? Is this such a big deal?
It’s not just that it’s women, though. It’s also young people, another key part of the Democratic base. The surge in new voter registrations is being powered by an upswing among voters under 30, who made up 43 percent of new registrations in North Carolina during the post-Harris announcement week. That compares to a 27 percent make-up of young people in the same period in 2020. And that surge accounts for a big partisan gap: The new registrations in North Carolina are +6 Democratic in 2024, compared to an even split with the GOP in 2020.
A six point partisan gap in new registrations is tough news for the Trump campaign, which had otherwise enjoyed drinking in the Democrats’ lack of enthusiasm all year long.
Another way to measure how big a deal this could be? Measure comparable “events” that saw a bump in registrants. An earlier and obvious high mark would be the week after the Dobbs decision came out. Dobbs drove such higher voter registration and subsequent turn out among women that it tipped the 2022 midterms in the battleground states just a few months later, causing that red wave to break upon a blue wall. (I wrote a piece about that phenomenon, including a big gender gap produced by Dobbs, and also predicted no “red wave” back in November of 2022.)
So how does new voter registration stack up against Dobbs? Bonier took recent voter registration data from New York state and found that, like North Carolina, there was a +12 gap between women and men in the week following Harris’s announcement. That’s huge! That same period back in 2020 saw exactly no gender gap. By comparison, in 2022 the post-Dobbs week in New York had revealed a gender registration gap of +6, which felt big at the time. But it was only half of the +12 gap we are now seeing in 2024 during the post-Harris announcement week.
Of course, New York isn’t a swing state, and abortion is not under threat there. But as Bonier notes, there are a half dozen competitive swing districts in NY that will likely determine control of the House. A big uptick in voter registration among women could play a decisive part.
Dobbs had a huge impact in 2022 in battleground states and red states where abortion was on the line. Harris’s surge in voter registration is like taking Dobbs, adding six points to it, and spreading it all across the country.
It takes a frustratingly long time for state voter registrars to update their data, because it’s usually not that interesting to anyone except election watchers. That’s why we’re only now able to look at numbers from NC and NY from back in July. But the numbers do offer some confirmation and good reason to keep doing what we’re doing—leaning in on the abortion question and energizing young voters, the very demographic that had been so lukewarm on the ticket before Harris declared her candidacy and became the nominee.
I’ve corrected a typo that should say +12 instead of +6.
What hits me is the number of people in the ten states with abortion on the ballot. In almost every state from Arizona to Colorado to Florida and so on, TWICE the number of signatures required were delivered. If you signed that ballot amendment petition, surely you'll be going to the polls to vote for a candidate who supports abortion in your state.