Tolbert: GOP Still Ahead In New Voter Registrations

Last month, I took I look at the new voter registrations by party showing that Republicans held the edge for 2014.  This is important as Democrats are consistently pointing to their ground game as the reason they believe they can overcome the reddening of Arkansas. Even faced with polls numbers showing their candidates are behind, they point to the ability to register and turn out new voters.

The latest numbers from the Secretary of State shows that even with the massive push in the last month before the registration deadline on October 6, Republicans still managed to slightly out pace Democrats.  For the final month of voter registration,, 1,207 new voters registered as Republicans with 1,197 checking the box for Democrat – just 10 new voters behind the Republicans. A total of 31,105 new voters were signed up during this final month with the vast majority registering as optional.

Republican campaigns I have spoken with have also expressed confidence that they are at least keeping pace with the massive voter registration efforts from Democratic organizers in the state. Data shared with The Tolbert Report show that while voter registrations are up in key counties for Democrats, such as Pulaski, and to a lesser extent Jefferson, Republicans are also seeing an increase in counties where the GOP traditionally does well such as Benton, Washington, Faulkner, and Saline counties.

This is bad news for the Democratic strategy this year as Mike Ross explained in a audio tape that came out this past summer.

“We are working it everyday. Sen. Pryor and I have the Democratic Party – the coordinated campaign. We now have over 100 people on the ground in all 75 counties organizing and a lot of these are people who were working for President Obama in swing states in 2012 and Terry McAuliffe in Virginia in 2013. They are not the ones knocking on doors; they are the ones who know how to crunch numbers. They know where the precincts are, where the voters are that you’ve got to turn out and they are organizing local folks to actually go out and be door knockers,” said Ross.

Of course, new voter registration is only one of the components where President Obama’s voter organization had success.  The overall strategy is to activate voters in demographic groups and areas where they traditionally do well. We will soon began to see if they are having success in this plan as numbers start to come in when early voting starts on Monday. But, the new voter registration numbers do not show much movement in the Democratic direction.