Plenty has been made about what the Democrats need to do to win back voters that once constituted the party’s base (i.e. young people, blacks, Latinos) yet broke for the GOP and President Donald Trump at historic levels in the 2024 election.
But as it turns out, those efforts are not going well – and the problem appears to be even worse than previously known. The New York Times published a shock report on Wednesday analyzing the Dems’ “voter registration crisis” that has been years in the making.
On Wednesday’s show Megyn was joined by Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine to discuss what the Times found and what it means heading into the 2026 and 2028 elections.
The Times Report
New York Times national political correspondent Shane Goldmacher and data journalist Jonah Smith share a byline on the new report that concluded voters’ shift toward the GOP is “a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.”
The problem, according to the authors, is not just the candidates Democrats are running but also what is happening before voters ever reach the ballot box. “The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls,” the article begins.
Over the past four years, the Times found the Republicans picked up a 4.5 million voter advantage over Democrats. In the 30 states plus Washington, D.C., that register voters by political party, “Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections.” In many cases, it was “by a lot.”
A closer look at four presidential battleground states – Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania – revealed “significant Democrat erosion.” In North Carolina, Republicans erased roughly 95 percent of the registration advantage that Democrats held in the fall of 2020. And the article noted that “the party saw some of its steepest declines in registration among men and younger voters… two constituencies that swung sharply toward Mr. Trump” in 2024.
Democrats still outnumber Republicans by party registration nationwide, but more newly registered voters are choosing the GOP over the Dems for the first time since 2018. To make matters worse, the Times noted that the Democrats’ numbers are bolstered by the fact that big blue states like California and New York allow people to register by party, while the largest red state, Texas, and other deep-red states in the south do not.
Michael Pruser, the director of data science for Decision Desk HQ, did not mince words when asked about the trend lines. “I don’t want to say, ‘The death cycle of the Democratic Party,’ but there seems to be no end to this,” he told the Times. “There is no silver lining or cavalry coming across the hill. This is month after month, year after year.”
‘Mechanics and Message’
The Times piece largely just confirms and drills down on what was already known about the state of the Democrat Party, but Halperin said the reporting is better late than never. “This has been going on for a long time. This is not some breaking news,” he noted. “I think that it’s partly the Democrats ‘woke’ weakness; it’s partly Trump; but part of why this happened – and why it’s continued to happen – is the Democrats and their allies in the media live in a blue bubble. This alarm should have been pulled… years ago.”
And while the report may diagnose the problem, Halperin said that larger issue for the left is that there is no obvious solution. “Nothing really is being done to address it,” he added. “As the story says, they don’t really have a plan to fix it.”
As Spicer explained, there are “two big Ms” at play – “mechanics” and “message” – and the Democrats “don’t have either” at the moment. He believes that will prove to be “impactful” not just in the 2026 midterms “but in the subsequent presidential election” as well.
A former Democratic strategist, Turrentine said Democrats squandered the upper hand they once held as it relates to ground game, voter registration, and the like. “It’s what the party has kind of hung its hat on now going back to 2008, [but] it turns out the Republicans have leapt so far ahead of us that we now have a serious problem,” he admitted. “The number of people who would say, last year, we knocked on doors in Philadelphia or Atlanta and said, ‘Are you going to vote?’ People would say, ‘Yes,’ but the problem is it wasn’t for Kamala Harris, it was for Donald Trump.”
That speaks to the duality, he said, of those “two big Ms” Spicer highlighted. “It’s message and mechanics… [and] what issue do Democrats have that is an 80/20 issue for us? Culturally, we remain totally disconnected,” Turrentine said. “So, I think the party has a lot of problems, and I’m glad it’s now being talked about in places like The New York Times where… in the blue bubble, this might be news.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Halperin, Spicer, and Turrentine by tuning in to episode 1,132 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.