It's been hard to tell, what with the Republican caucus in the lege and the Accidental Governor ignoring Democrats and trying "out-wingnut" each other, but there are signs that the Democratic Party has been making serious gains in Arizona.
Just in time for next year's elections.
In the area of voter registrations, the AZ Dems have cut the Rep registration advantage to 90,000 (as of July 2009). That sounds like a lot, until you remember that at this same time going into the 2006 Congressional midterm elections/statewide constitutional officer elections (July 2005), the Rep advantage was almost 150,000.
Just a reminder - In 2006, Democrats made gains in the lege and won two statewide seats, as well as gaining control of two more Congressional seats.
Even better than that is the latest report on state-by-state party affiliation figures from Gallup.
Not only is Arizona in the "competitive" category, we're actually listed as one having a slight (2%) advantage in people identifying themselves as "A Democrat" or "Leaning Democratic."
This is far from a guarantee of success for individual candidates or for the AZDems in next year's elections, but it does show that strong candidates combined with a strong outreach effort from all AZ Democrats could reap some serious benefits next year.
For both the ADP and, more importantly, the people of Arizona.
4 comments:
Hey Craig, it's a free world to put one's own party in a positive light but even the AP lays out the same changes thusly:
"New registration figures released Tuesday by Secretary of State Ken Bennett show the number of registered independents increasing by just under 18,000 to nearly 898,000 since April.
Meanwhile, the number of registered Republicans slipped by slightly over 2,000 to 1.1 million, and the number of Democrats dropped by slightly over 1,000 to approximately 1 million."
To me that says the Democrats lost voters at a rate only half the rate the Republicans did and those voters who are disinclined to want to label themselves as either Democrats or Republicans increased by a large factor.
Libertarians have added about 1,000 to our total recently (not that we don't have about a million more to add before we reach the D/R overall totals, but we are at least gaining and not loosing).
I wasn't dismissing the growth in the numbers of independent voters. In fact, I view it as a positive, so long as reputable pollsters like Gallup (and election results) show those folks are leaning Democratic.
Thank you Thane. I was going to ask how many jumped our two sinking ships, but I see you've already addressed that. While I'm encouraged that we have more independent voters, it still doesn't help that their choices of candidates are overwhelmingly stuck in one of the two bickering parties. Before we can truly move forward we must end this time sucking feud.
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