According to the AP, there is a political shift starting to spread in the U.S. as “tens of thousands of suburban swing voters who helped fuel the Democratic Party’s gains in recent years are becoming Republicans.”
Over 1 million voters in 43 states have switched to the GOP since last year, according to voter registration data obtained and analyzed by the AP.
The AP continues:
But nowhere is the shift more pronounced — and dangerous for Democrats — than in the suburbs, where well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump’s Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back. Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa.
AP spoke to Ben Smith, a resident of Larimer County, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, who said he reluctantly switched his registration to the Republican party earlier this year after begin more and more concerned about the “Democrats’ support in some localities for mandatory COVID-19 vaccines, the party’s inability to quell violent crime and its frequent focus on racial justice.” Smith said “It’s more so a rejection of the left than embracing the right.”
The AP studied around 1.7 million voters who had likely switched parties in 42 states for which there is data over the last year, according to political data firm L2, who uses a “combination of state voter records and statistical modeling to determine party affiliation, meaning that the switchers include both those who have formally changed their registration and those who L2 estimates have shifted toward the GOP.”
That data reveals that over the last year, around two-thirds of the 1.7 million voters who switched party affiliation did so by switching to the Republican Party, compared to just over 600,000 who switched to the Democrats.
The AP suggests that the “details about party switchers present a dire warning for Democrats who were already concerned about the macro effects shaping the political landscape this fall.”
