In a nondescript store front next to a Pembroke Pines gym, Florida Democrats launched a major offensive this week to boost their ranks despite a Republican law that makes the voter-registration push harder than ever.
President Barack Obama?s re-election campaign has closely studied the registration-crackdown law for months and devised a step-by-step quality-control process and is ready this weekend to train hundreds of volunteers at its 24 offices throughout the state.
The battle for the White House could literally hinge on the effort in a state where President George W. Bush won his first term in 2000 thanks to a margin of 537 votes in Florida.
But long before Election Day, Democrats will gather in meetings much like the one led Wednesdayby Organizing for America Florida activist Meghan Hardy. Bearing a chipper attitude and a Power Point presentation, Hardy taught about a dozen volunteers the dos and don?ts of voter registration. She gave a six-question quiz at the end.
?When we just register someone to vote, we don?t just register them and then stop,? Hardy said.
?We think about it as the beginning of a conversation that we?re going to be having with voters between now and Election Day.?
Once new voters are registered, the campaign will call and mail them to get them to the polls. As a result of their efforts, Hardy says, voters signed up in 2008 by the campaign were up to 20 percent more likely to vote when compared with voters signed up by other registration groups.
The new voter drive comes not a moment too soon for Democrats.
Since 2008, Democrats have lost 172,000 active voters ? a roughly 4 percent decline ? while Republicans have quietly launched a modest registration campaign of their own that has increased their ranks by almost 1 percent, or nearly 37,000.
The latest Florida poll shows Republican Mitt Romney ahead of Obama, 47 percent to 45 percent ? an inside-the-error-margin lead. Obama won Florida by less than 3 percentage points four years ago. In 2010, Republicans swept the state.
That makes every new voter count all the more heading into November.
Democrats still lead Republicans overall by a margin of 448,000 active registered voters. And, the Florida Democratic Party notes, they lead by an even greater amount ? 540,000 ? by including the pool of so-called inactive voters, who cast ballots so infrequently that the state doesn?t post information about them.
The Florida Democratic Party points out the inactive voters can become active. It says that about 100,000 of them showed up in 2008, when Obama won the state ? and the White House in the process ? by about 236,000 votes.
There are about 11.2 million active voters (plus 1.1 million more inactive voters). About 41 percent are Democrats, 36 percent Republicans, 20 percent have no party affiliation and fewer than 4 percent belong to a smattering of other parties.
Voter registration statistics aren?t clear predictors of an election?s outcome; just because a new voter registers Democrat, doesn?t mean he?ll cast a ballot or that he?ll vote for a Democrat.
But the numbers are a good barometer of the mood of the electorate and the state of the political parties and campaigns.
For instance, white voters appear to be dropping from the Democratic rolls, with 206,000 of them leaving since the last election. Black voters continue to leave the Republican Party, where African American active voters declined 7 percent to about 59,000.
louisville ky final four lotto winners mega ball winning numbers
কোন মন্তব্য নেই:
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন