New Voter • Freshman Chris Orozco registers to vote at a table manned by Jonathon Villanueva on the Arizona State University campus in Tempe. Villanueva is paid to register voters by MoveOn.org and Grassroots Campaigns, which support Barack Obama for president.

In a traditionally red state that has only once supported a Democratic presidential candidate since 1948, how much of an impact can 110,000 new, blue voters have≠
At the Sept. 10 opening of Barack Obama’s Phoenix headquarters, prominent Democrats spoke optimistically about the Illinois senator’s chances of upsetting hometown favorite Sen. John McCain in November. As hundreds of Obama supporters cheered and waved signs, state Democratic Party Chairman Don Bivens boasted that Democrats have a 2-1 margin over Republicans in new voter registration since the 2006 election.
While talk of Obama taking Arizona in November may be premature — numerous polls show McCain winning the state by 10-15 percentage points — Bivens’ statistics were accurate, give or take a few thousand. According to Secretary of State Jan Brewer’s office, Democrats have registered about 110,000 new voters since the 2006 election, compared to about 57,000 by the Republicans. But it’s not clear whether that will translate into more success at the polls for Obama, or any Democratic candidate in Arizona.
Arizona has long been a red state, and despite the Democrats’ gains in the past two years, the state remains a Republican-leaning state in terms of voter registration numbers. Registered Republicans total 1,061,591, compared to the Democrats’ 957,895, which leaves them trailing their GOP counterparts by 103,696.
Still, Democrats are optimistic about the success the new voters could bring in November. Their share of Arizona’s registered voters edged up from 33.45 percent in 2006 to 34.22 percent at the end of August, while the Republicans’ share dropped to 37.92 percent from 39.63 percent.
“I think things will look good for us,” said Maria Weeg, executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party. “We have a lot of competitive races at the congressional level and the legislative level. We expect to take full advantage of these increased registration numbers. And I think you’ll also see it come into play in the presidential election, with strong Democratic turnout for our nominee.”
 Weeg and others attribute some of the increased Democratic registration to enthusiasm over Barak Obama’s run for the White House, especially among younger voters. While McCain is still the odds-on favorite to win his home state and its 10 electoral votes, Democrats are hoping their increased registration numbers will help in some of the down-ticket races.
Republicans, on the other hand, tout overall superior numbers, and state Republican Party Chairman Randy Pullen noted that the Democrats’ gains were highest in counties and districts where Democrats already had a majority. Since 2006, Democrats have not taken a registration lead in any district or county that was predominantly Republican.
Democratic gains in Arizona’s 4th and 7th congressional districts only padded leads they already had, Pullen said. Republicans, he added, maintained their leads in the 5th Congressional District, where former Maricopa County Treasurer David Schweikert is trying to unseat incumbent Democratic Rep. Harry Mitchell, and the 8th District, where Republican state Sen. President Tim Bee is trying to do the same to Democrat Gabrielle Giffords. And Republicans still have a 150,000-person lead in Maricopa County.
“Quite frankly, it’s so spread out, and a lot of their gains were in districts where they already had a lead,” Pullen said of the Democrats’ increased registration numbers. “The ones that we’re really concerned about, which are what we think should be Republican districts, we haven’t seen much of a (Democratic) gain there.”
Pullen also said Republicans have had more voters re-register as independents or under a third party than the Democrats did, primarily over discontent with the party leading up to and following the 2006 election, which saw Democrats seize control of Congress for the first time since 1994. Indeed, the number of Arizonans who are not registered as Democrats or Republicans jumped by almost 100,000 in the past two years.
In a recent statewide phone survey, 60 percent of independents said they planned to vote Republican, Pullen said, and polls show that 93 percent of registered Republicans plan to vote for their party in November.
“That wasn’t the case two years ago,” Pullen said. “It’s almost back to what it was, essentially, in 2004. … The numbers we saw in 2006 weren’t anything like that.”
Earl de Berge, a pollster with the Behavioral Research Center in Phoenix, said there is little question of which candidates the registered Democrats and Republicans will vote for. The big question, he said, is who the independents choose. Independent voters make up almost 30 percent of Arizona’s electorate, de Berge said, which is higher than the national average.
“Nobody really knows a lot about them in terms of what they’re likely to do. But my guess is that, from what we can see and the closeness of the numbers, they’re probably going to skew a little bit in favor of the GOP this time around, which may give the edge to McCain,” de Berge said. “I don’t know if that will happen below the presidential level, though. There’s a lot of disaffection toward incumbents, and it may play itself out in this election.”
Another x-factor in the election is the youth vote. Voters in the 18-29 age group are often credited with helping to fuel Obama’s rise, and younger voters tend to vote Democratic, de Berge said.
The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office does not track the ages of voters, making it difficult to determine how many of the new voters registered by the Democrats in the past two years fall into the 18-29 age group, but Democratic Party officials expect younger voters will come out in full force for Obama on Nov. 4.
“I think that we’re seeing an incredible interest in registering and voting, and a lot of that has to do with the energy around Senator Obama,” Weeg said.
In terms of voter turnout, younger voters are notoriously unreliable compared with their older counterparts. Turnout among 18-24-year-olds in 2006 was 22 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, while overall turnout was 48 percent.
Lisa Fernandez, president of the Arizona State University Young Democrats, expects young voters to show up in record numbers this year.
“We’ve been trending since 2000 and 2004 that the youth vote is definitely increasing,” she said. “I think if you’re younger you’re going to be voting for Obama. And I really do think it’s going to be a record turnout in comparison to past presidential years.”
Michelle Dianda, a 21-year-old political science major at ASU, said she is excited to vote in a presidential election for the first time. She feels that the presidential campaigns are focusing on the youth vote more than they have in the past.
Dianda said she is encouraging others to take part as well. She has already gotten her roommate and boyfriend to register to vote.
“Younger voters just seem like they want to be more involved,” said Dianda, a native of th
e San Francisco Bay area.
There’s no question Obama, 47, has generated more excitement among younger voters than the 72-year-old McCain, but some Republicans are hoping Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin can help narrow the gap.
Wil Westholm, chairman of the Arizona Young Republicans, said Republican voter registration has increased since McCain selected the 44-year-old first-term governor as his running mate.
Pullen said that before McCain announced Palin as his running mate, the Arizona Republican Party office was getting three or four calls a week from people wanting to re-register as Republicans. But in the weeks since the Palin pick and the Republican convention, they have had more than 200 people call to change their registration to Republican, he said.
“We’ve seen a lot more interest, not just at the national level but in our local clubs, as a result of the Sarah Palin announcement,” Westholm said. “I think a lot of it is kind of just maybe the younger cross section of the conservative base in general, which may not have been all that excited about voting for McCain, but now is. You’re going to see the numbers pick up a little bit just based on that, but we definitely have had a lot more e-mails come in, phone calls, a lot more Web site visits.”
Fernandez said the youth vote has been undercounted in polls because most younger people only have cell phones, not the land lines that pollsters use to reach voters.
“I can’t think of anybody I know at ASU who actually has a home phone. So we’re not getting the calls about who we’re going to vote for,” she said. “I think that’s nationwide, that young people aren’t being called and aren’t being included in the polls, so I think the numbers are just a little bit off.”
But de Berge said recent studies call into question whether the lack of input from cell phone-only voters is skewering the polls as much as some people think.
“It doesn’t appear to make a great deal of difference, and besides that, I think the polling companies are beginning to figure out how to … do interviews with people who are cell phone-only,” he said.
A series of three surveys conducted recently by the Pew Research Center showed higher support for Obama in polls that include cell-phone respondents, but the differences were small and not statistically significant, the study said.
In Pew’s most recent poll, which surveyed 2,509 voters from Sept. 9-14, including 549 cell-phone respondents, Obama held a 46-44 lead over McCain. But when the cell-phone respondents were eliminated from the poll, the survey showed both candidates tied at 45 percent.
However, among the cell phone-only respondents, who are typically younger, Obama led the poll with 55 percent.