Democrats regain ground on voter registration in key states after sharp declines after 2024
After suffering massive voter registration losses following the last presidential election, Democrats have stemmed the bleeding in several key states heading into this year’s midterms, according to an analysis by NBC News’ Decision Desk.
NBC News’ Decision Desk analyzed voter file data from TargetSmart, a progressive data company, for seven of the states that were closest in the 2024 election and registered voters by party: Arizona, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. From the end of 2024 to the end of 2025, Republicans significantly improved their voter registration margin over Democrats in all seven states, including by a net of about 100,000 in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
But from late 2025 through the middle of this year, Democrats managed to reverse, but not completely erase, those losses in five of them, adding more net registrants than Republicans in Arizona, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And in New Hampshire and North Carolina, Democrats slowed the decline.
Although party registration is not a 100% predictor of vote choice, the recent movement in favor of Democrats on this front provides another reason to be optimistic for the party this fall. Arizona, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Pennsylvania all have crucial races for Senate or governor (if not both), while New Jersey, which has become more competitive in recent years, has a battleground contest for the House.
The trend comes not only amid a backlash against President Donald Trump that has deepened over the course of the year, but also as Democrats have campaigned in consequential primaries, often focused on where the party would go after its defeat in 2024.
At the same time, the pool of unaffiliated voters continued to grow in many of these states, reflecting growing distrust of the two major parties.
There are three main ways in which party registration margin can change: the registration of new voters; those registered change parties; or registrants being removed from the rolls after leaving the state, routine maintenance, or death. In total, 30 states and Washington, D.C., register voters by party, while the rest — including battlegrounds like Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — do not.
To track recent trends in voter registration, NBC News analyzed TargetSmart data after the 2024 elections, in late 2025 and in mid-2026, with the most recent data available in each state running from late June through September.
Democrats’ biggest problem on this front after 2024 has come largely from voters leaving the rolls. But analysis of voter registration data reveals that the problem wasn’t as bad for Democrats as it seems, because many of them were infrequent voters to begin with.
In all seven states, turnout in the 2024 elections was significantly lower among people who subsequently left the rolls than among those who stayed. For example, in Pennsylvania, the turnout rate for people who then left the rolls in 2024 was 37%, compared to 81% for those who stayed.
In battleground Pennsylvania, Republicans recorded their largest net gain in voter registration (more than 110,000) between the end of 2024 and the end of 2025 across the seven states analyzed. But between the end of last year and this summer, Democrats gained a net gain of about 46,000 votes.
Despite these heavy losses in 2025, Democrats actually gained about 22,000 registered new voters during that period. But this was offset by net losses due to changes in party registration (around 43,000) and registrations leaving the lists (around 90,000). It all adds up in a state that Trump won by 120,000 votes in 2024.
This fall’s data, however, tells a different story. New registrants and party switches gave Democrats net gains of about 45,000 and 11,000, respectively. This was more than enough to offset more modest losses among registrants who left the voter rolls.
Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chairman Eugene DePasquale said he prioritized voter registration efforts when he took office in September 2025.
About 150 staffers are now “talking to people from every corner of our Commonwealth, listening to their concerns, listening to their issues and explaining why they should register as Democrats,” he said, while also attributing Trump’s growing unpopularity.
North Carolina, however, remains a bright spot for the Republican Party: For the first time in state history, the party leads in party registration. From the end of 2024 to the end of 2025, Republicans’ net registration gain was just under 100,000. Democrats managed to keep the net loss at around 16,000 between the end of 2025 and last month.
“Traditionally, Democrats have always been better than Republicans at this,” said Felice Pete, a Republican National Committee member from North Carolina.
But in recent years, she said, conservative groups like Turning Point USA and Americans for Prosperity have helped the state’s Republicans increase their registration numbers through door-knocking and events.
“It’s almost like evangelizing, if you will,” she said.
Beneath the surface, there is a promising trend for North Carolina Democrats. While new registrants gave Republicans a net gain of about 11,000 last year, they gave Democrats a net gain of about 6,000 this year.
In North Carolina and four of the other states analyzed – Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania – the number of people who did not register with a party or who registered with a party other than Democrats or Republicans increased steadily from late 2024 to mid-2026. In Maine and New Jersey, this percentage decreased slightly.
Significantly more new voters in the seven states are registering as unaffiliated than those currently registered. And much of the estrangement from the Democratic Party comes from Democrats choosing to become unaffiliated, rather than registering as Republicans.
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