This article is made possible through Spotlight PA’s partnership with NOTUS, a nonpartisan news organization that covers government and politics with the fresh eyes of early career journalists and the expertise of veteran reporters.
Democrats hoped the 2024 election was their electoral low point.
In terms of one key metric, it wasn’t.
A new analysis of party-registration trends from the House Republicans’ political arm shows that, since the last presidential election, Democrats have continued to bleed voters in more than two dozen key House districts considered battleground seats this year. In most of those seats, Republicans have made gains with registered voters, making those areas more favorable to them ahead of this year’s midterm election.
It’s another sign of the Democratic Party’s deep and ongoing popularity issues since losing the last presidential election, when it sank to some of its lowest approval ratings on record.
“The battleground map keeps moving in Republicans’ direction, and this data shows House Democrats are running out of places to hide,” said Mike Marinella, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which conducted the analysis and shared the results with NOTUS, in a statement. “Republicans are welcoming voters with open arms, expanding the electorate, and building long-term strength in swing districts while Democrats continue losing ground cycle after cycle.”
In 28 congressional districts considered general-election battlegrounds, Democrats lost a total of more than 275,000 registered voters, an average of 10,000 voters per district. That’s according to the NRCC’s analysis, which found the number of registered Democrats shrinking in 27 of the 28 districts surveyed from November 2024 to May of this year.
The Democratic declines were steepest in battlegrounds like North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, represented by Democratic Rep. Don Davis; Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District, represented by Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan; and a trio of GOP-held seats in Iowa’s 1st, 2nd and 3rd Districts (held by Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, outgoing Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson and Republican Rep. Zach Nunn, respectively) — all of which are expected to be hotly contested in November.
Another battleground, Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, held by outgoing Democratic Rep. Jared Golden, has alone seen Democrats lose more than 23,000 registered voters in the last year and a half.
A voter’s partisan registration does not necessarily indicate how they will vote in any given election, and Republicans will still have to overcome deep dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump and ongoing concern about the economy to have success in the general election. Democrats have also shown recent voter gains in some states like Pennsylvania, reversing the registration trend for the first time in years.
Party strategists brushed off the analysis.
“Republicans are being rejected in election after election since Trump returned to the White House — and Democrats are overperforming by double digits,” said Viet Shelton, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
“In primaries across the country this year, Democrats are turning out at levels consistently dwarfing the turnout in Republican primaries,” Shelton went on. “Incomplete, cherry-picked data by the delusional hacks at the NRCC won’t change the reality on the ground: Democrats have the momentum, formidable candidates with cross-party appeal, and — most importantly — the American people on our side. We will take back the House majority in November.”
All but one district included in the analysis, Colorado’s 3rd, is considered a competitive House race by the Cook Political Report. The analysis doesn’t include some battleground districts in states that don’t have partisan registration, like Texas or Wisconsin.
It also doesn’t include some key districts, like California’s 22nd Congressional District and Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, that are less Republican leaning and considered “toss up” races by Cook.
But the ongoing registration losses for Democrats underscore how Republicans are fighting much of the 2026 midterm in increasingly conservative areas — a rightward lean that could help the GOP fortify itself against losses even in a difficult environment.
“The national Democratic brand is just very bad,” said David Kochel, a veteran Republican strategist. “And it hasn’t gotten any better.”
Democrats have steadily lost registered voters since the 2020 presidential election: From 2020 to 2024, the number of registered voters declined by 2.1 million across all 30 states that track voter registration by party, The New York Times reported. Republicans gained 2.4 million voters during that period.
According to the NRCC’s analysis, Republicans’ total number of voters also declined by nearly 50,000 across the 28 districts. But because the Democrats lost so many more voters, the Republican Party increased its marginal registration advantage over Democrats by an average of 1.5 percentage points since 2024 — a swing of nearly 230,000 voters total.
Compared to the party’s registration numbers in 2020, the Democrats’ losses are even more stark. The analysis found that after the 2020 election, Democrats had a 733,000 voter-registration edge on Republicans in these 28 districts. But in the nearly six years since, the party has lost 737,000 voters there, giving Republicans a small 4,100 voter-registration advantage.
The analysis includes districts all over the country: Arizona’s 1st and 6th; Colorado’s 3rd and 8th; Florida’s 9th, 14th, 22nd and 25th; Iowa’s 1st, 2nd and 3rd; Maine’s 2nd; North Carolina’s 1st; Nebraska’s 2nd; New Hampshire’s 1st; New Jersey’s 7th and 9th; New Mexico’s 2nd; Nevada’s 1st and 3rd; New York’s 3rd, 4th, 17th and 19th; and Pennsylvania’s 1st, 7th, 8th and 10th.
In North Carolina’s 1st District, the most competitive one in the state, Republicans steadily decreased the gap between their registration numbers and Democrats’. In 2018, Democrats outnumbered Republican registrations by nearly 22 percentage points. Republicans have trimmed that down to an nearly 4 percentage point difference, as of May 2026.
“That’s really indicative of what we’ve seen both locally as well as nationally, where Democrats are out of touch,” said Jason Simmons, the chair of the North Carolina Republican Party. “Their policies are no longer representative of the values of North Carolinians, and especially eastern North Carolina.”
The diminishing margins are due to new voters joining the party as well as “refugees from blue states” who are moving to North Carolina, Simmons said. The 1st District also added several conservative counties when the state Legislature redrew its lines last fall.
The district, which spans the northeast part of the state from the Virginia border to the coast, hasn’t elected a Republican to Congress since 1883.