Happy election day, kossacks! Below the fold of this short diary is some great news from The Ocean State about voter registration trends. But first, this piece of trivia for the trivia buffs out there: on today's ballot in Rhode Island voters will decide whether or not to officially change the name of the state. Right now, as it has always been called, the name of the state is "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations", and voters today will choose to keep that name or change it to simply "Rhode Island." OK, now on to the news.
Paul Edward Parker at The Providence Journal reported today this great news (emphasis mine):
Rhode Island’s electorate will be younger and more Democratic in Tuesday’s election than it was in the historic 2008 balloting that sent the nation’s first black president to Washington, a Providence Journal analysis of the state’s voter registration database shows.
No Democratic Party "enthusiasm gap" trending in Rhode Island. Nope. Yet, somehow I'll bet this Democratic trend escapes both coverage by the national media and acknowledgement by the GOP who continue to spout the myth that America is "a center right country."
Parker goes on to report about the RI voter registration trends:
In all, the total number of voters climbed by 9,496, or 1.4 percent, from 701,126 in 2008 to 710,622 in 2010.
OK, 1.4% might not seem like much when taken in isolation. But consider that 1.4% increase in registered voters from 2008 through 2010 in the context of Rhode Island's population change. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's population trends, the population of Rhode Island increased only 0.5% from April 2000 through July 2009.
What's going on here? Well, reports Mr. Parker (emphasis mine):
nearly 32,000 new voters younger than 30...registered after the 2008 election. That accounts for 45.2 percent of the 70,104 new voters.
and (emphases mine):
Looking at registration by party affiliation,...[the] shift went almost entirely toward the Democratic Party, which claims 43.6 percent of the registered voters in 2010, up from 42.5 percent in 2008.
To me it looks like both the George W. Bush administration and the Barack Obama administration have had this effect on the people of Rhode Island: more people and younger people are registering as Democratic voters.