John Hood has written an excellent piece today in which he takes apart what has been a much touted story line here in North Carolina: that a massive surge in voter registration is making history.
Wrong.
My argument is not that these are phantom efforts just producing a bunch of falsified registrations. In fact, I’m not denying at all that Democratic candidates (with the important exception of Beverly Perdue, still trailing Pat McCrory in the gubernatorial race) are reaping benefits from an “enthusiasm gap†and from the fact that new voters are more likely to be Democratic, and far less likely to be Republican, than the existing electorate is.
All I’m saying is that, as I predicted several months ago, voter registration is not growing at a record rate. In fact, the 9 percent growth in registered voters so far in this presidential-election cycle (from the end of 2004 to now) is on track to be a little over the 2000-2004 trend (8 percent) but below the 12 percent average registration growth over presidential cycles since 1980. The truly record surges were those leading up to the 2000 and 1984 elections. The voter rolls grew by about 18 percent in both cases
