Recent voter registration numbers from the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office show an increasing number of voters in Maricopa County registering as Republican rather than Democrat. Between last fall’s election and April, Republican voter registration in the county increased by 9,905 to 851,047. Democratic voter registration increased by only 2,791, less than a third as much. Republicans maintained their registration advantage at 34.39 percent, while Democrats dipped below 30 percent to 29.69 percent.
Democrats held 31.38 percent of voter registrations in the county during last fall’s election, 29.58 percent during the 2018 general election, and 28.57 percent during the 2016 presidential election. The new figures increase Republicans’ lead over Democrats to almost 5 percent, a gap that hasn’t been seen since 2018.
Independents in the county increased significantly since the fall election, by 24,948 to 867,582, overtaking Republicans and Democrats. Recent polling of independents found they are split evenly between both parties.
Statewide, Republicans maintained their lead over Democrats at around 4.5 percent, 1,441,026, to Democrats’ 1,263,056, or 34.57 percent of the total. Independents remained close to Republican levels. The Libertarian Party stayed the same at fewer than 1 percent of registered voters, with 33,367, and the new “No Labels” political party reported only 17 registered voters.
In heavily Democratic Pima County, Democrats lost some of their lead over Republicans since the fall election, decreasing their advantage by 2,466. Democrats now number 245,052 to Republicans’ 175,858 there.
The Arizona Sun Times spoke with Seth Keshel, a former Army captain in military intelligence who was heavily involved in investigating election fraud. He said Arizona has been the most reliable state in the country for any political party since 1952 in predicting who the state will choose for president. The only exception until recently was in 1992, when the state went for Democrat Bill Clinton due to a surge in support for third-party candidate Ross Perot. However, at the same time, Maricopa County went for the Republican candidate Bob Dole.
“Arizona has been more reliable for Republicans than Minnesota has been for Democrats,” Keshel said. He said he believes there were 352,000 fake votes for Joe Biden fraudulently added into the 2020 election. That year, he said Democrats “supposedly” received three times more votes in Maricopa County than in any previous election cycle in the county. He believes Donald Trump actually won Arizona by 11.5 percent, citing tens of thousands of questionable votes from Arizona’s counties.
Keshel said another swing state that went for Biden has been trending more Republican in recent years. In 2016, Democrats held a 10.5 percent voter registration advantage over Republicans in Pennsylvania. Due in part to the popularity of Trump, he said that advantage decreased to 7.5 percent in 2020, with new registrations trending 21 Republicans to each Democrat. Going into 2020, 60 out of 67 counties became more Republican, he added.
Democrats’ voter registration edge in Pennsylvania has continued decreasing to 5.3 percent, Keshel said, and two counties just flipped and have more Republicans than Democrats, Fayette and Burks counties. Beaver County is about to flip, he said. The reason Pennsylvania has been a competitive state despite the Democratic voter registration advantage, Keshel said he believes, is because many blue-collar workers register as Democrats due to the unions but vote Republican.
Maricopa County was the only Arizona county to flip in the 2020 election. Trump won over 248,000 more votes in Arizona in 2020 than he did in 2016, even though he lost the race.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Voter Canvassing” by SEIU CC-NC-2.0
