So far, Dems seem to have advantage in signing up new voters

The Democrats appear to be gaining the upper hand in the battle to sign up new voters in the all-important swing states, an Associated Press analysis suggests.

The AP analysis of the most up-to-date figures from across the country found that the Democrats have registered more new voters than the Republicans have in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and New Hampshire, while the GOP has done better in Iowa and appears to be holding its own in Florida.

Florida registration tallies from more than half the counties show that the Republicans and the Democrats are virtually tied in the race to increase their share of voters in the state that decided the presidential election four years ago. In those counties, the Republicans have signed up just a few thousand more.

As for the two other big prizes among the swing states -- Pennsylvania and Ohio -- Pennsylvania's numbers are too scant to draw any conclusions, and Ohio does not register voters by party.

"We're living politics right now, everywhere you turn," said Kevin Glat, auditor in Burleigh County, N.D. "It was such a close race four years ago that people are finally coming to the realization that every vote does count."

Now, the real test is whether the parties can get these newly registered voters to the polls. New voters are often less likely than others to actually cast a ballot.

"It's the end-all, be-all. Nothing matters unless they show up to vote," said Mindy Tucker Fletcher with the Florida GOP.

But it is not a big Election Day turnout overall that matters to the two parties -- it is a big turnout of their supporters. So each side has combined time-demanding door-knocking with expensive computer mapping to get their voters registered.

The Republicans built a network of volunteers with close supervision from White House strategists. The Democrats are relying on an array of community-based groups and a separate organization, America Coming Together, that has raised over $100 million.

Florida is once again emerging as one of the most critical of swing states, combining a big 27 electoral votes with polls showing a close split among voters. With 38 counties providing registration rolls so far, the picture is incomplete. But those counties, a mix of Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning counties, offer a fairly representative glimpse at the state overall.

Those counties had 633,132 new voters sign up this year, or an 11.7 percent increase. Democrats saw their numbers rise by 191,544, or 8.2 percent. Republicans saw 194,348 new voters sign up, for a 9.2 percent rise.

The analysis does not provide a complete picture of voter registration because some states had not finished counting and others only report on a county basis. The analysis sought a fair sampling of counties to reflect each state's larger political demographics.

Voters do not register by party in Ohio and Michigan. Others, because of backlogs or same-day registration, could not provide enough data to judge: Maine, Minnesota, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Pennsylvania, for which data from only six counties were available, showed Democrats may be building a bigger base there. The results, however, relied on counties more Democrat-leaning than the state overall.

The data showed the Democrats' numbers growing by 8 percent. The Republicans' numbers grew only 5.1 percent.

Independent voters are also playing a big factor. Their numbers are growing faster than either party's supporters in several states, including Arizona, New Hampshire and New Mexico.