2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: When will the Democratic Party ask itself why it is losing so many members? [View all]99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)The data is scarce and a bit confusing on this. One source says:
'An estimated 201.5 million U.S. citizens age 18 or over will be
eligible to vote Nov. 2, although many are not now registered. Of
these, about 55 million are registered Republicans. About 72 million
registered Democrats.
About 42 million are registered as independents, under some other
minor party or with a "No Party" designation.'
http://www.answers.com/Q/How_many_registered_Democrats_are_there_in_the_US
So adding these up comes to a total of roughly 170 million registered voters over-all
But Wiki says "22 states don't register voters by party"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_U.S._states
So I don't know how, in these 22 states, anyone really knows # of reg. Dems v. Republicans
And in 2014 Gallop said "42% of registered voters identify as Independents"
http://www.gallup.com/poll/166763/record-high-americans-identify-independents.aspx
So these numbers, from different sources, don't seem to add up to make any sense,
since 42% of 170 million registered voters would be 70.9 million independents,
not 42 million as claimed by answers.com.
An October 2014 Guardian article says there are over 180 million registered voters in US.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/15/voter-registrations-us-election
Above sources all have somewhat different dates, but still the numbers seem wildly at variance
I guess my take-away is, with something between 170 voter - 180 million voters over-all,
my saying Bernie is drawing "millions" of otherwise disaffected voters and/or independents
into the Democratic Party may be a slight exaggeration, but i still wouldn't be surprised if
it was close to 1 million, maybe more. But i'm not sure there's a way to verify that, except
anecdotally.