[lbo-talk] A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

Yoshie:
> I wonder what the precise impacts of partisan and non-partisan voter
> registration and turnout drives, financed by millions of dollars,
> will be in Ohio and other battleground states.  What proportions of
> newly registered voters will go out to the polls and vote the ways
> that those who financed their registration want them to respectively?
> 
> <blockquote> The analysis by The New York Times of county-by-county
> data shows that in Democratic areas of Ohio -- primarily low-income
> and minority neighborhoods -- new registrations since January have
> risen 250 percent over the same period in 2000. In comparison, new
> registrations have increased just 25 percent in Republican areas. A
> similar pattern is apparent in Florida: in the strongest Democratic
> areas, the pace of new registration is 60 percent higher than in
> 2000, while it has risen just 12 percent in the heaviest Republican
> areas.
>

The Harrisburg paper just had an article that PA voter registration offices
are inundated with new registration requests.  My guess is that the new
registrants will tend to vote for Kerry to avoid escalation of war and
draft.  Old farts with grown up children do not fear draft, and they tend to
be more conservative anyway, so they have little use of Kerry.  However,
middle age, middle/working class families with teenage children legitimately
fear that their kids may be drafted to fight this war.  Besides, families of
those who are already in Iraq are not happy about the escalating fighting.  

Add to it anxieties over job loss in the rust belt.  The free reign that the
Bush administration gave to the industry is already producing some reaction
in very unusual quarters, as reported in the last issue of The Nation (which
also contains a piece of idiotic rant by Cockburn, which raises the question
whether the man failed to grow out of juvenile contumacy).

Wojtek