FRANKFORT, Ky. — Sometime in the next year, registered Republicans in Kentucky are likely to outnumber Democrats for the first time in modern history.
The number of registered Republicans, more than 1.58 million, trails registered Democrats by just under 55,000, a tiny fraction of the 730,000 margin Democrats held over Republicans 25 years ago.
The Republican Party of Kentucky has heralded this shift as a big win. State GOP spokesman Michael Lonergan contends the policy choices of Gov. Andy Beshear, President Joe Biden and other recently elected Democrats are fueling the switch.
"As a result, Kentuckians are abandoning the Democratic Party — and registering Republican — in record numbers," Lonergan said in a news release. "These figures show a clear trend — The Democratic Party is completely out of step with Kentuckians' values."
Democrats and political observers across the state doubt the movement in voter registration has much to do with any current policymaker. It's just a matter of the label catching up with the behavior, they say.
Many Kentucky Democrats have been voting Republican in federal elections for decades, a trend that has spilled over into state elections in recent years and could soon change the landscape of local politics in the Bluegrass State.
"What we're seeing is the generational change in registration data that already happened in the voting data," said D. Stephen Voss, a University of Kentucky political science professor. "Republicans want to say 'we're getting new people,' and yes it's a little bit of that. The Democrats will say, 'we were already losing back when we had big registration advantages,' and that's also true."
Republicans making up ground to Democrats' registration figures is nothing new; their climb has been steady since as far back as the late 1990s.
The State Board of Elections posts statewide voter registration data as far back as 1996, when Democrats enjoyed a near 2-to-1 majority: 1,475,802 to Republicans' 746,174. Afterward, the GOP has gained ground on Democrats in 11 of the last 13 election cycles.
Since former President Donald Trump entered the political picture in 2015, Republicans have closed the gap at an even faster pace. From 2000 to 2014, Republicans gained an average of roughly 34,000 voters every two years. In the three federal election cycles where Trump was either on the ballot or the sitting president, Republicans have gained an average of 120,000 registered voters compared with Democrats.
KDP Executive Director Sebastian Kitchen said he found it "odd" that Republicans would celebrate their continuing deficit.
"We appreciate the Republican Party pointing out there are still more registered Democrats in Kentucky," Kitchen said.
In statewide elections, Kentucky has reliably elected Republicans to federal office for some time. The last Democrat to hold a U.S. Senate seat was Wendell Ford, who retired from that office in 1998. With the exception of notable southern Democrats Bill Clinton, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter, Kentucky has also picked a Republican in every presidential election since 1956.
State offices have been more of a mixed bag, though Beshear and Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman are now the only Democrats elected to statewide office in Kentucky. The Kentucky House of Representatives flipped red in 2016, while the Kentucky Senate has been under Republican control since 2000, despite registered Democrats outnumbering Republicans by nearly 693,000 voters at that time.
Today, 79% of the state Senate is Republican-controlled and 75% of state House seats are held by the GOP.
The difference between voter registration and election results can be difficult to grasp for some outside the state, Voss said.
He recalled a conspiracy theory spread online, which falsely indicated that the Republican Party had "messed with the results" in order to engineer Sen. Mitch McConnell's near-20 point victory over Amy McGrath in 2020.
That unsubstantiated claim, laid out in a post on Twitter, received 13,700 retweets.
Part of the poster's confusion was that registered Democrats in places like Eastern Kentucky's Elliott County far outnumber registered Republicans, more than 4-to-1. And yet Trump defeated Biden there 2,246 to 712 in 2020; McConnell won big as well, as did most Republicans in down-ballot races.
In 2008, Obama soundly defeated his Republican challenger John McCain there by more than 25 percentage points. Obama eked out another win there in 2012 before Trump won in 2016 and 2020.
It is a sense of heritage that inspires voters to stubbornly keep their traditional party registration even though they no longer vote for its candidates, said University of Louisville political science professor Adam Enders.
"There were some stronger labor traditions in parts of Kentucky that might have kept people registered as a Democrat ... and up until recently I would say that if you looked at Kentucky state lawmakers, there were Democrats from rural areas that actually held very conservative positions," Enders said. "But the extent to which ideology and party registration were matching up in Kentucky was just a little bit askew, and it's been correcting."
There's also a practical reason many Democrats have been slow to switch their registration, said Al Cross, Director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and longtime Kentucky political commentator.
In Kentucky, you have to switch your party before the end of the year to vote in the following year's primary elections.
"If it had been possible to change your registration closer to the election, then we would have already been a Republican state several years ago," Cross said.
Since Republicans already have a dominant position in Kentucky politics, political observers said shifting voter registration trends will likely have a greater impact on primary elections than general elections.
For Democrats, the gradual exodus of conservatives from their rolls could make it more likely for progressive candidates to win the party's nomination, Voss said.
For Republicans, Enders said, there are two factors to consider: on the one hand, those who hadn't previously identified as Republicans might be more moderate in their views. On the other hand, when a person makes a conscious choice to identify with the national party it could signify that they have developed a more partisan outlook on politics.
Another figure that impacts primary elections is the increasing number of voters who don't claim either major party. Even though Kentucky law disallows those voters from participating in partisan primaries, they have doubled in number over the past 25 years. At 351,844, registered voters who aren't Republican or Democrat make up almost one tenth of all registered voters.
Local impact
The county courthouse might be where voter registration changes have the largest impact in coming years.
Rep. Brandon Reed, R-Hodgenville, rejoiced via Twitter that his native Larue County, the birthplace of first-ever Republican President Abraham Lincoln, just this month developed a razor-thin Republican margin.
Larue County has long swung to the right in presidential elections but it has a Democratic judge-executive, appointed by Gov. Andy Beshear after the retirement of Judge-Executive Tommy Turner, a Democrat who served in that post since 1985.
Most of Kentucky's Judge-Executives are Republican, but it's not nearly as resounding a majority as the veto-proof supermajorities in the state House and Senate. Forty-seven Democrats, three independents and 70 Republicans occupy those seats, according to the latest figures from the Kentucky County Judge-Executive Association.
As for how electing more Republicans to an office like county judge-executive, and magistrates below them, might affect policy, Cross wasn't sure.
"These offices are about providing basic public services," Cross said. "You don't get involved in a lot of the social issues that have come to define the two parties. Now, Republicans are probably less likely to raise taxes, but there's always been a very strong anti-tax feeling at the local level in Kentucky anyway."
