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This statistic (PDF) is making the Democratic email rounds: Total 2008 Voter Registration by Party as of October 7, 2008 | All Voters | Democrats | Republicans | Unaffiliated | Other | | 211,371 | 153,145 | 30,009 | 25,812 | 2,814 |
Not bad for a state that already is strongly Democratic. As for the reason, Dan Rodricks sums it up fairly well: Some of the new registration undoubtedly represents voters switching from Republican or "unaffiliated" to the blue party, though to what extent officials of the Board of Elections can't say; they don't have easy access to that information. But voter shifting is a national trend. It's safe to assume that growth in Democratic rolls comes from Obamamania among the young and, to some extent, men and women who've made a decision to switch their party affiliation.
In other words, it's a bad year for Republicans, who've held the White House for the past eight years and some or all of the Congress for most of that period, and have only an unpopular war and an economic crisis to show for it. I'm not one to say that everything bad that has happened to the country recently is the Republicans' fault, but it's hard to say what they've done to improve matters.
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