Democrats activate weeklong voter drive to offset critical registration losses

The Democrats are launching a weeklong bid to register voters nationwide, particularly in battleground House districts as their party grapples with increasing numbers of Americans registering as Republicans.

The nationwide trends in party registration – detailed in an article published in August by the New York Times – heightened concern that the Democrats’ drubbing in the 2024 election was not the one-off result of a chaotic presidential campaign won by Donald Trump and the Republicans, but rather signs of a broader shift by voters away from Democrats.

While the party has in past years left voter-registration efforts in the hands of outside groups, Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Ken Martin said now is the time to get directly involved again with a drive he dubbed the National Voter Registration Week of Action.

“Across 27 states and territories, Democrats will be hosting a combined 50 events to register voters and hold Republicans accountable for selling us out to their billionaire backers. We’re building the infrastructure necessary to win everywhere. The work continues now,” Martin said.

The DNC plans to hold the events to which Martin referred at venues like stadiums and farmers’ markets, in coordination with state parties and college Democrats. Martin said the push was a follow-up to the DNC’s “organizing summer” where the Democrats expanded their volunteer base to 41,000 people and interacted with 1.6 million voters.

It also plans to be on the campuses of several universities in battleground districts that could determine the majority in the House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections, including in Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

While not all states allow voters to register by party, the Times analyzed data from the 30 that do and found that Democrats lost a total of 2.1 million registered voters from 2020 to 2024. Meanwhile, the Republican party gained 2.4 million registered voters. The losses were broad-based, occurring in both battleground states and those dominated by one party or the other.

And in 2024, more people chose to register as Republicans than as Democrats for the first time since 2018, the Times reported.