Democrats facing crisis as more than 2M voters leave party in four years: analysis

The Democratic Party is bleeding registered voters, suffering a 4.5 million swing against it that could take years to recover from, according to a new report.

Between the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, Democrats lost about 2.1 million voters across the 30 states that track registration by political party, according to a New York Times analysis of data gathered by the L2 tracking firm.

Over the same period, the Republican Party gained 2.4 million registered voters.

Officially, there are still more registered Democrats than Republicans nationwide, but that number is incomplete because blue states like California and New York allow voters to register by party — as does the District of Columbia — while reliably red states like Texas, Missouri and Ohio do not.

Most alarmingly for Democrats, the decline is nationwide, with the US seeing more new voters registering with the GOP in 2024 for the first time in six years.

Democrats also saw their registered voter advantage dwindle in four 2024 battleground states — Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — all of which President Trump carried this past Nov. 5.

Michael Pruser, who tracks voter registration closely as the director of data science for Decision Desk HQ, warned that the numbers not only help explain Trump’s victory last year — in which he became the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years — but also forecast significant headwinds for Democrats in next year’s midterm elections as well as the 2028 presidential vote.

“I don’t want to say, ‘The death cycle of the Democratic Party,’” Pruser told the Times, “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,” he added.

In North Carolina, Democrats lost 115,523 voters between the 2020 and 2024 election, with Republicans gaining more than 140,000 members and erasing the Dems’ registration advantage, according to the L2 data.

Democrats suffered similar losses in Arizona and Pennsylvania, while in Nevada — a state whose politics were long dominated by the Las Vegas-based Culinary Workers Union — the share of registered Democrats suffered the second-steepest plunge of those states measured between 2020 and 2024. (Only deep-red West Virginia saw more precipitous losses.).

Even Democratic bastions like New York and California were not safe from voter erosion, with Dems losing 305,922 registered voters in the Empire State in between the two elections. In California, Democrats lost 680,556 voters between 2020 and 2024.

All in all, Democrats went from enjoying an advantage of nearly 11 percentage points over Republicans in registered voter numbers in 2020 to just over six percentage points across the 30 states and DC in 2024, the Times found.

Experts believe that the fall of new Democratic registrations can be linked to the growing number of voters choosing to be independents or unaffiliated, a trend that is sapping both parties’ rolls.

In 2018, more than one-third (34%) of new voter registrations nationwide were Democrats, while registered Republicans made up just 20% of new voters.

As of last year, however, Republicans had erased that gap, with party supporters making up 29% of new voters, while Democrats made up 26% of new voters.