Dem, GOP registration grows as Trump drives voters to ‘pick a lane’

SACRAMENTO — For the first time in nearly two decades, the Republican Party grew in California last year. At the same time, Democrats expanded their dominance as the largest party in the state.

Political experts say the growth of both parties — with a simultaneous decline in the number of independents — is the result of growing polarization in the state’s electorate and a belief on both sides of the divide that the opposing party poses an existential threat.

The Chronicle analyzed registration numbers across California and found that voters in almost every county gravitated toward the two

major parties starting after the 2018 elections and running through the November 2020 presidential vote.

It was a break from the previous 20 years, when both the Democratic and Republican parties steadily declined in registration shares as more voters signed up as “no party preference.”

Democratic and Republican consultants and activists agree on one thing — the dividing wedge that drove many voters to align red or blue was former President Donald Trump.

“He forced voters to pick a lane — ‘Either you’re with me or you’re against me,’ ” said Robin Swanson, a Democratic strategist in Sacramento. “This is the result of partisan rhetoric. It’s not saying that voters want more of it.”

The surge in partisan registration was not so much a reflection of enthusiastic support for Republican or Democratic leaders, political observers said, as it was driven by fear.

Michael Madrid, a veteran GOP consultant who opposed Trump, called the phenomenon “negative partisanship” — the notion that voters pick a party primarily based on what they see as the threat of the other party.

“People are taking sides because the parties are increasingly defined by the extremes. And I mean, the extremes,” Madrid said. “There is a cultural war going on, and it’s not a cold war.”

Statewide, 24.1% of voters are now registered Republicans, an increase of 0.6 percentage points from two years ago. Democrats make up 46.2%, a jump of three percentage points. Independents make up 23.7%, a drop of nearly five percentage points.

The Chronicle’s analysis compared registration data from the February after each statewide election for the last 20 years, to reflect partisan shifts at the end of every twoyear cycle.

In 2018, the Republican Party shrank in nearly every county in the state. But the party surged back in 2020, with net gains in voter registration over Democrats in 22 of the state’s 58 counties.

Democrats made net gains over the GOP in the other 36 counties, and claimed the majority of new voters and those who switched parties in urban and suburban counties.

The Republican electorate grew fastest in counties in the Sierra foothills and Northern California. They are sparsely populated rural areas that have been conservative bastions for decades and are becoming even more so.

GOP registration in Lassen County, along the Nevada border in the Sierra north of Reno, grew by more than six percentage points — the largest proportional gain in the state. Republican voters now outnumber Democrats in the county by 31.

Jeff Hemphill, a Republican supervisor and thirdgeneration rancher in Lassen County, said voters there flocked to Trump, whom he called a “regular man’s billionaire,” because they were frustrated by job losses and a sense that Democrats don’t care about them.

Hemphill said the county’s economy was booming 50 years ago, fueled by a vibrant logging industry. But the last mill closed more than a decade ago, and few good jobs took its place.

“We don’t like being thrown out by the state,” Hemphill said of rural Californians. “My dad was a Kennedy Democrat, but my dad wouldn’t be a Democrat today because the party has left them behind.”

It’s no coincidence that Lassen and other counties where Republicans made their greatest gains also supplied an outsize share of the signatures for the petition drive that is likely to put a recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom on the ballot later this year.

Democrats, meanwhile, padded their registration advantage most in the Bay Area, where party strategists say many independents decided to go blue because they feared a second Trump term.

San Francisco and Marin County reported the largest gains for the party in the state — Democratic registration surged by more than five percentage points in both places.

Paul Cohen, chair of the Marin County Democratic Party and a campaign consultant, said many independents who went Democratic were likeminded progressives who saw in Trump “an existential threat to our democracy.”

“You get tired of saying, ‘This is the most important election of our lifetime.’ But this must have been it,” Cohen said.

While Democrats increased their overall advantage statewide, Republicans also gained voters in many blue areas. For example, GOP registration grew by 0.3 percentage points in San Francisco after shrinking in every election cycle for decades.

Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican lawyer who lives in the city, said the party did better statewide less because of Trump and more due to frustration with coronavirus health restrictions that forced the closure of inperson schooling and indoor church services for nearly a year.

“People are very dissatisfied with the oneparty state that we live with in California,” she said. “Nobody’s happy with California.”

Some analysts say the drop in the number of independent voters could be tied to the state’s motor voter program, which automatically registers people to vote when they do business at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

California saw a steep rise in independents after the program started in 2018, which many blamed on a setting that defaulted voters to “no party preference” if they did not select a party. The DMV later made changes to help prevent people from unknowingly becoming independents.

Glitches aside, the DMV program has contributed to a surge in overall voter registration. California registered 88% of eligible voters last year, an increase of nine percentage points from 2019. Every county in the state reported a sizable registration jump.

Katie Merrill, a Democratic political strategist in Berkeley, said less frequent or new voters on both ends of the political spectrum were unusually motivated in 2020.

On the Republican side, she said, many were aggrieved libertarians or people for whom GOP presidential nominees such as Mitt Romney had been insufficiently conservative. She predicted the party could have a hard time keeping those voters if Trump fades from the spotlight.

“Trump was able to voice their grievances in a way that no Republican candidate had before,” Merrill said. “They felt like there was a place for them.”