Republican gains in voter registration are raising red flags for Democrats in key states, underscoring the inroads the GOP made across the country in 2024.

Active registered Republicans now outnumber Democrats in battleground Nevada for the first time in nearly two decades, according to January data from the state. The GOP has also gained recent ground in New Jersey, a traditionally blue state, and Trump this week celebrated that the voter registration majority in Florida’s Hillsborough county switched from blue to red.

The latest shifts, following eroding Democratic registration in states like Pennsylvania and Arizona last year, underscore the work that lies ahead for Democrats as they look to rebuild and retake power in Washington.

“People switch the way they vote, then they switch their registrations. And you think about Nevada and New Jersey, those are two states that saw pretty significant shifts towards the Republicans in November,” said Marc Meredith, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The exact factors behind changing registration numbers vary between states, and not every state counts its voters by party, Meredith noted. But the changes in Nevada and elsewhere largely reflect the voter behavior seen last fall, when Trump swept the battlegrounds and improved on his 2020 margins across the board, including in blue strongholds, as most of the country moved rightward.

Shortly after former President Biden carried Nevada back in 2020, Democrats in the state were recorded at around 655,000 active registered voters in January 2021, compared to 576,000 Republicans and around 436,000 nonpartisan voters.

But by the end of January 2025, on........

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