A Numbers Shift
September is national Voter Registration Month. We spoke earlier this week with Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, whose office handles elections in Iowa. If you missed the conversation, you can listen via the audio-on-demand section on the main page of kxel.com.
Each month, the Secretary’s office publishes on line the spreadsheet showing voter registration numbers…by county, by party, by congressional district, etc.
Overall, we have nearly 2.2 million registered voters in Iowa…but roughly a third of those are in the “inactive” category. Those folks are still registered to vote and can show up to cast a ballot any time…but they have not voted in some time, so they are classified as “inactive” voters.That leaves nearly 1.5 million active voters…with all parties and candidates hoping to keep them voting, and lure some of the 720,000 inactive voters back to the polling place.
Here’s the interesting part to me, though. Going into the last general election, just 11 months ago, three of the four congressional districts had more registered Democrats than Republicans. The only “red” district was the western Iowa fourth district.
Today, an entirely different picture. Each of the four congressional districts has more active voters who are Republicans than Democrats. The margin is 7,000 more in the southeast Iowa first district, 10,000 more red than blue in the northeast Iowa second district, 6,000 more Republicans in the south central third district, including Des Moines, and a whopping 113,000 more GOP active voters than Democrats in that western Iowa fourth district.
And similarly, in each of the four districts, the number of inactive Democrats outpaces the number of inactive Republicans…by significant amounts.
15,000 more in the first…14,000 more in the second…13,000 more in the third…and 35,000 in the fourth.
I understand, that’s a lot of numbers to take in verbally…but the bottom line is that Democrats are, in increasing numbers, sitting on their hands and not turning out. And it would not take many of those inactive Democrats in districts 1, 2, and 3 to show up and change the outcome of elections.
And it’s not a one-time thing; you don’t get put on the inactive list for missing one election. So this is a trend that has been growing in Iowa for some time…failure of Democrats to get their voters to show up.
If you’re a Republican, you like the scenario. But don’t get too comfortable…because registered voters who go inactive do so because they are not motivated to show up. All it takes is one candidate they really like—or conversely, really hate—to get them back into the voting habit.
And with these numbers, as noted, it might not take much for Iowa’s red wave of last November, to be a sea of blue the next time out.
