Democrats are increasingly sounding the alarm as the party’s voting registration has faced problems in various swing states with Election Day just a few weeks away, The Hill reported on Sunday.

One such example is Pennsylvania, where “if you look at the changes from 2020 to 2024, Democrats are down about 300,000 voters and Republicans are up about 70,000,” said Berwood Yost, director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College. “Nonaffiliated independent voters are up about 83,000, 85,000 voters.”

He said, “It’s definitely a warning sign, but we knew this was going to be a close race. This is another example of that.”

Yost specified that declining Democratic voter registration is especially problematic for Vice President Kamala Harris in swing counties in Pennsylvania, such as Erie, North Hampton, and Bucks, and in rural counties, such as Fayette County, where she wants to keep former President Donald Trump’s margin of victory as small as possible.

David Paleologos, the director of the Political Research Center at Suffolk University in Boston, added that Democrats had about a 666,000-person voter registration advantage over Republicans in Pennsylvania in 2020, which has shrunk to a 354,000-person advantage in 2024.

He also pointed out that in another key battleground state, North Carolina, the Democrats’ voter registration advantage has decreased from plus-393,000 voters in 2020 to only about plus-130,000 voters in 2024.

Paleologos said that “the general shift has been away from being registered as a Democrat over the last four years,” explaining that “it’s been more of a decrease of registered Democrats” than a surge in Republican voter registrations.

Although Democrat strategists in Pennsylvania and North Carolina concede that their party’s voter registration advantage has declined in those two key states since Joe Biden won Pennsylvania and narrowly lost North Carolina in 2020, they explained that the shifting registration numbers are catching up to voting behavior, as registered Democrats who voted for Trump or others in the GOP have only recently come around to changing their party registration.

“What’s happening is that some registered Democrats are changing parties to reflect how they’ve been voting for years. A 2020 Trump voter who changes his registration from Democrat to Republican in 2024 doesn’t indicate much about how voting in Pennsylvania will change in 2024,” said J.J. Balaban, a Democratic strategist based in Pennsylvania.

Paleologos added that the margins between the parties in voter registration have shifted in two other battleground states: Arizona and Nevada.

In Arizona, Republicans have doubled the voter registration advantage they had over Democrats in 2020, when Biden won the state.

“When you look at Arizona, which Biden won, … Arizona had a net registration advantage for Republicans of 130,000, but that’s doubled. Now the Republican registration advantage in Arizona is 259,000 [people],” Paleologos said.

In Nevada, Paleologos said Democrats have always had their voter registration advantage narrow significantly, as the party had a net registration advantage of nearly 79,000 in 2020, which has since gone down to a net advantage of plus-29,000 registered voters.

Jon Ralston, CEO of The Nevada Independent, said the Democrat voter advantage in Nevada was about 5 points in 2020 and it now stands at just 1 point.

© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.