Democratic strategist privately warns of surging voter registration among Trump-leaning demographics

Poll after poll may give Democratic nominee Joe Biden the advantage next month, but Democrats still have some fears.

While Democrats have made voter registration and flat-out voting a major message throughout their pushes for Biden, Republicans have still so far been winning the voter registration game. Democrats haven't publicly acknowledged their shortcomings, but at least one is privately sounding the alarm, Thomas B. Edsall relays in an opinion column for The New York Times.

Both national and swing-state polls continue to give Biden an advantage over President Trump this November, with FiveThirtyEight's presidential tracker showing Biden with an 87 in 100 chance of winning. But voter registration tells a different story: Republicans have added hundreds of thousands more voters to their ranks across the swing states of Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A Democratic strategist "who closely follows [voter registration] data on a day-to-day basis" revealed Republicans' advantage from a different angle in a privately circulated newsletter, Edsall reports. "Since last week, the share of white non-college over 30 registrations in the battleground states has increased by 10 points compared to September 2016, and the Democratic margin dropped 10 points to just 6 points," the strategist writes. "And there are serious signs of political engagement by white non-college voters who had not cast ballots in previous elections."

Pew Research Center data also spells a bit of trouble for Biden among Hispanic Catholics and Black women, who seem to have slightly drifted to Trump. Read more at The New York Times.