15,000 Democrats left party, letting them vote in GOP primary
More than 15,000 Massachusetts Democrats have left the party since the beginning of the year to join the state’s dominant bloc of unenrolled voters or to become Republicans, moves that will allow them to cast votes in Tuesday’s GOP presidential primary.
Secretary of State William F. Galvin on Monday called the shifts significant, particularly for a GOP race in which Nikki Haley is leaning on Massachusetts and more than a dozen other states where voters will hit the polls on Super Tuesday to keep her long shot bid alive against Donald Trump in the Republican primary.
The Democratic decampments have echoes of 2016, when nearly 20,000 Democrats left the party ahead of that year’s presidential primary. A record 637,703 voters later cast ballots in the state’s GOP election that March, giving Trump 49 percent of the vote and helping fuel his march to the party’s nomination.
Galvin is not expecting the same level of activity this year, saying that he believes turnout will exceed 400,000 in the GOP primary. He’s expecting another 600,000 people to vote in the Democratic contest, where President Biden is widely expected to win.
It’s impossible to know why each person switched their voter registration, or how Democrats who switched to being an independent or a Republican intend to wield their ballot, if at all. The vast majority — 13,042 in total — chose to become unenrolled voters, while 2,276 jumped to the GOP.
“That could be a factor in [Tuesday’s] voting,” Galvin said, noting that the presence of Trump remains a thread in voter registration shifts going back eight years.
“The one common theme between 2016, 2020, and 2024 is Donald
Trump,” said Galvin, an eight-term Democrat. “It’s a factor, however you want to play it, or however you want to observe it.”
Haley, the former South Carolina governor, has routinely appealed to independent voters in states where they can vote in the GOP primary. Trump topped Haley by double digits in New Hampshire, for example. But he especially lagged among independents in the state, where they make up the largest voter bloc.
In Massachusetts, Haley would need a swell of support from unenrolled voters if she hopes to capture even a share of the delegates available under the state party rules, which award all 40 to any candidate that earns more than 50 percent of the vote.
That said, not all the movement in party registration in recent months pointed toward the GOP primary. An additional 5,000 voters who were previously unenrolled joined the Democratic Party since Jan. 1, according to state data. Fewer than 300 made the jump from being Republicans to Democrats.
But the wider shift toward the ranks of the unenrolled feeds into what’s been a long-running exodus from both major political parties. Unenrolled voters now account for 64 percent of the state’s 4.95 million registered voters, a rise from last year when Massachusetts already had the highest share of unaffiliated voters of any state.
That means membership in both parties is waning, even if Democrats still dominate at the ballot box. Just 27 percent of Massachusetts voters are now registered as Democrats, and just 8.4 percent are Republicans. All told, independent voters outnumber Republicans more than 7-to-1 and Democrats more than 2-to-1 in the state.
“That’s really amazing to me,” Galvin said.
The state’s past presidential primaries broke records for turnout. About 1.7 million voters cast ballots in the 2020 presidential primaries. The vast majority — more than 1.4 million — voted in the Democratic race in which President Biden emerged with a surprising victory that helped cement his rise to the nomination.
More than 1.8 million people voted four years earlier, with nearly double the number of voters casting ballots in that year’s open Democratic contest than in the GOP primary.
As of Monday, 479,778 people had already cast ballots for this year’s presidential primaries, mostly through mail-in voting. Of those, the majority, or about 355,600, had voted in the Democratic primary, according to Galvin’s office.
Biden does not face a serious challenge on the primary ballot, which also includes US Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and author Marianne Williamson. But the president could face other headwinds.
Activists who support a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war are urging voters to choose the “no preference” option to register opposition to Biden’s support for Israel. The effort gained traction after more than 100,000 voters in Michigan’s Democratic primary cast ballots for “uncommitted” in the race, enough to earn two delegates from congressional districts around Ann Arbor and Detroit suburbs.
“Biden and the Democrats have been taking our votes for granted for too long,” Humayun Morshed, a Muslim community organizer in greater Boston, said in a statement.
But it is unclear whether Massachusetts voters will embrace it at a similar level as those in Michigan, where the Arab American population is the largest, per capita, in the nation.
Tuesday’s primary will also come on the heels of a momentous Supreme Court decision restoring Trump’s name to 2024 presidential primary ballots after ruling that state can’t invoke a post-Civil War constitutional provision to keep presidential candidates from appearing. That power, the court ruled, rests with Congress.
The decision will end efforts in Colorado, Illinois, and Maine to keep Trump off the ballot, in addition to a similar, long-shot challenge in Massachusetts, where the Free Speech For People and attorney Shannon LissRiordan argued that Trump was ineligible because he “engaged in rebellion and insurrection against the Constitution of the United States.”
Galvin said it only added significance to Tuesday’s vote.
“This morning’s decision makes it all the more important that those voters who have opinions on the presidency take the opportunity to express them,” he told reporters at the State House on Monday. “Because clearly, what the court said today was that they will not do anything to decide the outcome of the presidential election.”