Trump Sees Reason for Hope in Voter Signups That Polls May Miss
Trump Sees Reason for Hope in Voter Signups That Polls May Miss
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump and his campaign have cited increased Republican voter registrations as a sign he still has a viable path to re-election, despite public polls showing him headed for a loss.
As of this week across eight battleground states, Republicans have registered about 179,000 more voters than Democrats since 2016, including big net gains in two states that could decide the election -- Florida and Pennsylvania. After the 2016 election, famously decided by about 88,000 voters in three Midwestern states, that margin could prove significant on Election Night.
Democrat Joe Biden holds a lead of roughly 8 points on average in national polls, but Trump and his allies consider voter registrations one of the indications that public opinion surveys are once again failing to fully capture the president’s support -- what Trump has called a “silent majority,” and what some pollsters call “shy Trump voters.”
“There are glimmers of hope, because I think the president’s campaign did what the last two incumbents did, which is: alter the composition of the electorate,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist. “Now, whether it’s enough to overcome the polling deficit, we’ll find out. But it’s clear to me that the field operation they’ve built has obviously done something -- you can see it in the voter registration stats.”
There are several factors that run counter to the Trump campaign’s rosy outlook, however. For one, in half of the eight battleground states, it is Democrats -- not the GOP -- who have made bigger gains signing up voters.
And the sheer number of voters living in the eight states, about 48 million, means the GOP sign-up advantage would only matter if the election is exceedingly close.
Polls don’t show a very tight election at the moment. And Trump has openly marveled that he could lose, despite the thousands of supporters who regularly pack airport hangers for his campaign rallies. He and his campaign claimed this week that momentum is on the president’s side, calling the Republican advantage in voter registration a key indicator of enthusiasm.
Trump has regularly dismissed polls, instead promising a “red wave” of voters and predicting gains for his party in Congress. “I think we’re going to win the House. You’ll see, but I think we’re going to win the House,” he said Thursday night at the final debate between the two candidates.
‘Incredible’ Enthusiasm
He’s made clear that the voter registration figures are one reason for his optimism.
“We have a lot of Democrats who are coming over as Republicans; we have a lot of registration that people don’t talk about in North Carolina, Pennsylvania,” Trump said in an Oct. 13 interview on the “What The Hell” podcast.
“So I think we’re going to be in great shape,” he said. “I just see it. I see the enthusiasm. It’s incredible.”
Trump’s campaign has leaned particularly on Republican success narrowing registration gaps in Florida and Pennsylvania, two states crucial to his 2016 victory that are all but must-win for him again this year. Together, they will award 49 of the 270 electoral college votes necessary to win.
In Florida, the GOP added about 445,000 voters to the rolls since 2016, compared with 298,000 for the Democratic Party. In Pennsylvania, Republicans have added more than 200,000 voters since 2016, while Democrats lost more than 10,000 -- though they have registered new voters at a faster pace this year than the GOP.
“Republicans’ portion of the electorate has swung violently in Republicans’ favor since Election Day 2016, in nearly every battleground state. And importantly, we have seen a surge in registrations in Republicans’ favor down the homestretch over the last few weeks and months of the campaign,” Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien said this week.
The president’s campaign says that increased Republican voter registrations are the result of an expansive -- and expensive -- field operation across the country. The Trump campaign has 285 field offices and about 2,000 paid staff -- twice as many offices and field workers as in 2016. Increased voter registrations give the campaign more wiggle room for get-out-the-vote efforts intended to make sure supporters show up at the polls, one official said.
Yet some key battlegrounds -- including Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Minnesota and Texas -- do not report voter registrations by party, leaving an unclear picture of what the efforts have achieved.
Biden has not made comparable investments on the ground, a deliberate decision to eschew face-to-face campaigning because of the coronavirus pandemic.
‘Numbers and Data’
Trump and his top campaign officials believe that legwork, along with an aggressive schedule of as many as five rallies a day in the final stretch, will energize Republican voters and provide momentum going into Election Day.
“We feel better about our pathway to victory right now than we have at any point in the campaign this year,” Stepien told reporters on Monday. “This optimism is based on numbers and data, not feel, not sense.”
Voter registrations, though, are a notoriously imprecise measurement of actual enthusiasm to cast a ballot. For example, look no further than Pennsylvania in 2016, when registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than 900,000. There were also more than 1.2 million people registered with neither party, and Trump edged Hillary Clinton by 44,292 votes in the state, or less than a percentage point.
The number of unaffiliated voters in Pennsylvania has grown to more than 1.3 million this year.
“Registration doesn’t equal voters. It really matters who turns out, not who’s registered,” said Trey Hood, a political science professor at the University of Georgia and director of its Survey Research Center.
He noted the large numbers of unaffiliated voters in all of the states.
“When the election is really close, that’s going to make a big difference,” Hood said. “Pandemic aside, even in previous elections, I’ve learned the hard way you can’t make any inferences about what’s going on in the early election period, because there’s still Election Day.”
Fundraising Gap
Another enthusiasm indicator Trump’s campaign used to point to, fundraising, has turned dramatically against him. Biden out-raised Trump by about $135 million in September and by about $150 million in August, wiping out the financial advantage the incumbent president once enjoyed and allowing the former vice president to blanket the airwaves in battleground states with television ads.
Biden holds leads of varying sizes in polls of battleground states Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia, and is essentially tied with Trump in Ohio and Iowa.
And there’s even reason for Trump to worry in the voter registration figures.
Democrats have seen a surge in net voter registrations in Ohio, cutting the Republican party’s lead in half since 2016, from 746,000 more registered voters than Democrats to 368,000 now. They have made smaller net gains against Republicans in Arizona, Nevada and New Hampshire.
Ohio has more unaffiliated voters than the total number registered by either party, and the Trump campaign official noted that a competitive Democratic primary may have increased registrations for that party this year.
Under Ohio law, voters register an affiliation by requesting a ballot in a primary election. Those who don’t vote in primaries are considered unaffiliated.
But David Pepper, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, said he was optimistic the state would go for the Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 2012.
“We saw registrations that greatly added to our rolls,” Pepper said. “A huge chunk of that was younger people. We added a lot more young people to the rolls, especially very late.”
And in New Hampshire, where polls show Biden with a double-digit lead, the state’s Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley said: “We’re feeling pretty positive. I think the people of New Hampshire are just ready to turn the page.”
In the three battleground states where Republicans have made the largest gains -- North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida -- Democrats still hold an overall lead in voter registrations.
Democrats in Georgia and Texas have been excited about turnout during early voting in their states. Recent polls of Texas, a Republican stronghold since 1994, have shown Biden tied or even leading Trump.
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