There is mostly good news for the new voter registration totals in NC, PA, and FL.
NORTH CAROLINA
First, let's start with NC.
The Obama campaign reached a milestone in North Carolina this past weekend. As of the report of 10/6/12, here are the voter registration numbers:
Dems 2,803,323
Reps 2,019,294
Inds 1,668,493
Democrats have an advantage of 784,029 over Republicans in terms of registered voters.
Since the last report, here are the numbers for newly registered voters:
Dems +13,669
Reps +5,811
That is a margin of +7,858 for Democrats, even higher than the previous week's margin of 6,245.
Now let's make a direct apples to apples comparison with the first report of October from 2008:
Dems 2,735,413
Reps 1,959,080
Inds 1,330,536
Democrats had an advantage of 776,333 over Republicans in terms of registered voters on October 4th, 2008.
Therefore, we have actually increased our advantage in terms of registered voters over the Republicans by 7,696 since four years ago. That is welcome news, although I'm not sure how hard Obama is going to fight for North Carolina - I haven't heard of any advertising buys there in weeks. In any case, the overall trajectory for North Carolina is that it will eventually be, at the very least, solidly purple, if not light blue. And with a superior ground game and GOTV effort, I firmly believe that Obama can still win North Carolina.
PENNSYLVANIA
Now here are the numbers for Pennsylvania.
Current voter registration numbers (Oct 8th report):
Dems 4,214,523 (50.08%)
Reps 3,114,868 (37.02%)
Oth 1,085,373 (12.90%)
TOTAL 8,414,764
Democrats in Pennsylvania currently hold a voter registration advantage over Republicans of 1,099,655. This is down from the advantage of 1,236,467 we held just before the election in 2008, but the latest report doesn't include the final two or three days before the deadline. And still, our advantage is much, much bigger than it was in 2004, when John Kerry squeaked by in PA. At that point, it was just 580,208. So we have come a very long way since 2004.
Here are the latest numbers of new voter registrations over the past week:
Dems +17,405
Reps +10,454
Inds +10,386
So Democrats had an advantage of new voter registrations of 6,951 over Republicans in the last week.
FLORIDA
Here are the latest figures from Florida, although they are incomplete because the SOS in Florida is agonizingly slow in updating the figures. I had to get what little information I have from an article I found online.
For the month of September, Democrats outregistered Republicans in new voters to the tune of 18,063. That's not stellar, but it is what it is. Florida Democrats say they have 500,000 more voters on the rolls than Republicans. However, this is down sharply from the nearly 700,000 voter registration advantage we held in 2008. But, we still have had the first nine days of October to get some last-minute registrations in. So we will see what the final numbers are. I'm praying for somewhere in the neighborhood of 540,000. Let's hope so.
OHIO
And in terms of Ohio, someone provided a link on one of the threads earlier today which displayed how many Democratic, Republican, and Independent ballot requests have been made in Ohio up until now. The numbers do not look fantastic, but we will have to keep tabs on these to see if an overall trend can be shown.
Dems 252,540 (30.51%)
Reps 201,627 (24.36%)
Ind/Oth 373,670 (45.14%)
TOTAL 827,837
So as we can see, Independents are way ahead of both Democrats and Republicans in terms of absentee ballot requests. Democrats hold an advantage of +6% in these early ballot requests, but that is down from +15% from four years ago. Now it's important to realize that the +15% number was for the entire early voting period leading up to the election so this is not an apples to apples comparison. Also, four years ago, we had early voting on every weekend, not just the weekend before the election.
In addition to that, the way that they measure these requests is based on the last primary someone voted in. Now there were probably quite a few Democrats who decided to vote in the Republican primary this year, so these numbers could reflect that.
In any case here are some links:
To the NC numbers:
http://www.ncsbe.gov/...
To the PA numbers: http://www.dos.state.pa.us/...
To the FL article:
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
To the OH spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/...