Few N.H. Democrats leave party ahead of primary, data show
New Hampshire voters apparently like their lane.
Despite a last-hour push to coax Democrats to switch parties for the state’s first-in-the-nation primary, fewer than 4,000 — or about less than 2 percent statewide — ultimately left the Democratic Party to join the GOP or become independent voters before last Friday’s deadline, new data show.
Overall, just 4,920 voters changed their party affiliation ahead of next year’s presidential primary, according to New Hampshire’s Secretary of State’s office. Of those, roughly 3,500 Democrats changed to unenrolled, while another 400 registered as Republicans. Another 719 Republicans also dropped their party status to become unenrolled, while a smattering of others joined one of the two major parties.
That migration, or lack thereof, means the state’s 879,137voter electorate will remain relatively stable entering the still-tobe-scheduled primary. Former president Donald Trump holds a commanding lead in polls in the Republican nominating race, while President Joe Biden may ultimately have to win as a writein candidate in a noncompetitive Democratic race.
The overall number of voters itself dipped by about 17,500 voters, a 2 percent drop, from Aug. 1, the last time the state updated its party registration figures.
A variety of super PACs and groups had mounted a campaign to persuade Democrats to switch parties or turn independent, framing it as a way to stop Trump in the GOP primary. In New Hampshire, like in Massachusetts and other states, undeclared voters can vote in a primary of their choosing.
The argument came from groups backing Republican candidate Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who has appealed to independent voters as a Trump alternative. Another super PAC, known as PrimaryPivot, has also tried to convince independent and Democratic voters to flood the GOP race and vote for someone other than Trump.
Any New Hampshire voter who wanted to switch their party enrollment ahead of the primary needed to do so by Friday.
After the dust cleared, few did. Republicans now account for 30.7 percent of the state’s voters, with 269,766 in total. That’s actually a slight drop from the 275,514 registered in the GOP in August, with some leaving the voter rolls altogether. About 30.2
percent of voters are registered Democrats.
When accounting for the state’s 344,212 unenrolled voters, about 70 percent of the electorate will be eligible to vote in the GOP presidential primary. That amounts to a less than 1 percentage point change from two months ago, when 69 percent were.
Trump won the 2016 primary with 36 percent of the vote, topping his next closest competitor, John Kasich, by nearly 56,000 voters. In a similarly sprawling field this year where former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida governor Ron DeSantis have polled ahead of Christie, that theoretically leaves a large gulf of voters to win — or bring into the primary — to catch the front-running Trump.
Christie has said if he doesn’t fare well in New Hampshire, “then I’ll leave” the GOP race. In fact, Christie was the top choice among likely GOP primary voters of which candidate should bow out of the race sooner rather than later, according to a Suffolk University/Boston Globe/ USA TODAY poll.