Nearly 54 million new voters since 2008.
Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, said national registration now stands at 200,081,377 voters.
The figure means more than 50 million new people have registered to vote in the past eight years. Only 146.3 million were registered as recently as 2008, when then-Sen. Barack Obama first won the White House — a remarkable 33 percent surge in the electorate during a single presidency.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party and many other groups have been pushing hard for more registered voters and more non-whites to participate in our elections.
If you listen to some of the pundits, (the so-called journalist Chuck Todd comes to mind) they almost never factor non-white voters in their arguments as to why Donald Trump and Republicans are failing so badly. It’s as if we don't exist.
Well folks, according to Pew Research, we do and we are a force to be reckoned with in 2016. 2016 may very well end up being the most racially diverse electorate in history and that is great news for Democrats.
If you notice, in the states mentioned below, Democrats are leading large among new registrants and in some cases, the leads are massive. Check out the leads we have in Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina and in Virginia the lead for Democrats among new registered voters is almost 40% over Republicans!
Overall, TargetSmart found that 42.6 percent of the new voters registered this year lean Democratic, and only 29 percent lean Republican (28.4 percent lean independent).
Worse for the GOP, registration trended more Democratic in every single battleground state, from a small margin in Georgia (4.3 percentage points) to massive leads in diversifying states like Colorado (29.3 points), Nevada (20.4 points) and North Carolina (9.2 points).
And since June 1, the trend has been even more stark. In Virginia, TargetSmart’s data show only 11.7 percent of new registrants lean Republican — versus nearly 50 percent expected to lean Democratic.
Across all 15 battlegrounds, the Democratic advantage is nearly 22 percentage points since June 1.
Robby Mook is also very encouraged by what he’s seeing.
“It remains to be seen how different demographics perform proportionally but we are very encouraged by the early signs that we have seen,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters this week. Clinton is pushing aggressively for increased turnout among black, Asian-American and Hispanic voters.
Why is all this great news important?
Well according to Pew Research, they are predicting that the 2016 election will be the most diverse in history. If you check out their graph below, the share of white vote is decreasing and non-white voter participation is increasing.
78% white participation in 2000. 71% white participation in 2012. Pew is predicting 69% white participation in 2016. This matches the roughly 2-3% decrease in white voter participation every four years since 2000.
If you look at Pew’s graph below, the trend is unmistakable. The Republican Party has huge problems. There is an ever increasing participation by non-whites and they can no longer count on whites to power a Republican Presidential candidate to victory.
I believe this is the reason some pollsters, at times, have shown this race closer than it is. They are predicting a more white electorate, which the obvious trend belies.
There are 10.7 million more eligible voters today than there were in 2012. More than two-thirds of net growth in the U.S. electorate during this time has come from racial and ethnic minorities. Hispanics, blacks, Asians and other minorities had a net increase of 7.5 million eligible voters, compared with a net increase of 3.2 million among non-Hispanic white eligible voters.
The growth among non-Hispanic white eligible voters has been slower than among racial or ethnic minorities in large part because they are overrepresented in deaths due to an aging population. Non-Hispanic whites make up 69% of U.S. eligible voters, but accounted for 76% of all eligible voters who died (6.6 million of 8.7 million) between 2012 and 2016.
And former Romney strategist Stuart Stevens puts this in perspective. Without a substantial amount of non-white voters, the Republican Party can no longer win General Elections.
Former Mitt Romney strategist (and avowed Trump opponent) Stuart Stevens looked at the math for the Daily Beast last week. "In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56 percent of white voters and won a landslide victory of 44 states. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 59 percent of whites and lost with 24 states," Stevens wrote. He continued: "The simple truth is that there simply aren’t enough white voters in the America of 2016 to win a national election without also getting a substantial share of the non-white vote."
The Republican Party hating and blaming non-white voters, to hold on to their ever decreasing white support is backfiring. They have reaped what they sowed.