Not only are Democrats losing registered voters; the Republican Party is gaining voters.

The New York Times is out today with a piece of political analysis from reporter Shane Goldmacher that will send ominous tremors rippling throughout the worlds of both Democratic and Republican politics. The Democratic Party seems to be dissolving away, losing its long-held edge in registered voters to the GOP as it simultaneously loses its sense of proper direction.

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.

Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.

That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.

Goldmacher and the New York Times did their own work here, partnering with an election data organization to sift through the recent registration changes in the 30 states of the union that provide such data. (My own state of Illinois is unfortunately not among them.) The short version: Not only are Democrats losing registered voters — in a relentless, month-by month, year-over-year wave since the start of the Biden administration — the Republican Party is gaining voters.

This is not a matter of “a pox on both houses.” Nor is it just a matter of college-age progressives leaving the Democratic Party out of disappointment at their lack of revolutionary conviction. Young first-time voters are now registering as Republicans in numbers that utterly shock me as a Generation X veteran of MTV “rocking the vote” for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Even more devastatingly, the article notes that a staggering number of older Democratic voters in key swing states such as Pennsylvania and Nevada are reregistering as Republicans in a way not seen since . . . well, ever. (Not during the Reagan era, that’s for sure — a less party-polarized time when Democrats reliably controlled the House of Representatives and often the Senate as well.) The trend is uniform and national, not merely regional. The reasons for this are left to the reader’s imagination.

I strongly recommend that you read the full piece yourself, not the least reason being that it quotes many of my acquaintances from the world of electoral analysis — even an analyst from my alma mater Decision Desk HQ — saying intelligent things. The more important reason to read it is that the implications of this data are going to matter. This is a Big Story, in the same way I consider our upcoming gerrymandering apocalypse to be a Big Story. It is a thorough analysis raising multiple questions about the long-term health of the Democratic Party as a brand or coherent identity.

It is important, when covering the day-to-day hugger-mugger of the Trump administration’s serial provocations and the Democrats’ fumbling counterprogramming, to keep one’s eye on the longer game. And as a student of the “long game” in American electoral politics, I confess that I am downright disoriented to be living through an era in which the Democratic brand has been so damaged, even as the Republicans have mutated since 2010 into a populist working-class party. My childhood was defined by the image of Democrats as forever in the numerical ascendancy as registered voters — Republicans had to “run smart” because the Democrats always had more manpower on the battlefield — both where I lived and nationally, due to inevitable demographic trends. Reality turned out to be quite different.