The War of the Votes
Have you seen The Fantastic Four: First Steps yet? It's really good. Have you checked your voter registration lately? That'd be really good, too.
The kids and I went to see The Fantastic Four: First Steps the other day. Really enjoyed it, great movie.
I particularly liked the 1960s aesthetic. The shag carpet. Weird, rounded computer monitors. The whole fins-on-the-car-fenders feel to it was perfectly executed.
That look and feel went a long way in helping me along with what I like to do with this superhero multi-verse movies, which is imagine what life would be like for us if we’d just done some things different.
What if we sent a family of weird scientists to deep space and they came back with superpowers?
Or here’s another question: what if Democrats had taken voter registration seriously, say, ten, fifteen, even twenty or twenty-five years ago?
It’s a question you can’t help but ask yourself if you read this week’s New York Times piece, The Democratic Party Faces a Voter Registration Crisis:
The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.
Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.
That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.
The picture is bleak, and only appears to get more bleak the further you read. If you don’t believe me, here’s the assessment around the end of the story:
Any hope that the drift away from the Democratic Party would end organically with Mr. Trump’s election has been dashed by the limited data so far in 2025. There are now roughly 160,000 fewer registered Democrats than on Election Day 2024, according to L2’s data, and 200,000 more Republicans.
The bottom line is that Democrats did a poor job of registering Democratic voters over the last several years. And now that the Democrat brand is totally in the tank, our near-term and long-term future as a majority party is questionable (at best).
If there’s a villain who knows when to add insult to injury, it’s Donald Trump, who this week called for the end of mail-in ballots:
Trump has railed against the practice most of his political career, ramping up his lambasting of the practice during and after his unsuccessful 2020 reelection bid. He began the week with an early morning vow to, as he wrote Monday in a 7:17 a.m. social media post, “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.”
He uses a lot of misinformation to support his claims that mail-in ballots are fraudulent. Let’s be clear, though: there’s nothing fraudulent about them. It’s just that Democrats tend to use them more than Republicans.
Although the lawyers in the White House are apparently drafting an Executive Order, it is unclear at best that he has the authority to end mail-in ballots. But even if he doesn’t, I’m not sure it matters. If he says mail-in ballots are corrupt, that’s what people will believe.
There’s a lot of analysis back and forth about what the decline in Democratic voting registration means. It’s a bad brand. Democrats aren’t popular. They have no vision for governing America. Democratic elected leaders aren’t talking to the people where they are. Democrats don’t have their own “Joe Rogan.” I don’t know if it’s any of that. It’s probably all of that — all of that and more.
But the truth is, I don’t think it’s about Democrats. I think it’s about Republicans, their messaging, and specifically Donald Trump’s messaging. Yes, it’s everything awful and hateful — from racism to trashing the economy. But Democratic registration isn’t just falling. Republican registration is rising (in some cases, at alarming rates).
Because this is what people want. This is what people voted for. This is what the American people want. And it’s more and more people, growing every day.
So. How do you fix that?
I don’t have a good answer, here, no good solution. Maybe you get in a space ship and fly around, hope for super powers when you get home.