[Updated] A look at new registered voters in Kansas in 2008 shows slightly more new Democrats have registered to vote statewide than new Republicans, but Republicans had the edge in 2007. However, there were more new unaffiliated (“independent”) voters than either Democrats or Republicans. The number of new Reform or Libertarian party voters statewide is almost negligible.
See the charts below showing the cumulative number of new voters in 2007 and 2008 in Kansas by week.
Click here for a PDF version of the charts below, or click on charts below to view at full resolution.
The chart above for 2008 shows a slight D advantage early in the year, but R ‘s mostly caught up just before the August primary.
While the charts above show data for new voters, the totals for voters by party is also revealing.
Registered Voter Counts at Selected Dates
| Date | Democrat | Reform | Libertarian | Republican | Unaffiliated |
| Dec 27, 2006 | 442,217 | 1469 | 9241 | 762,659 | 448,399 |
| Jan 28, 2008 | 433,997 | 1396 | 9090 | 743,609 | 449,063 |
| May 14, 2008 | 447,015 | 1367 | 9071 | 739,090 | 448,112 |
| Sep 2, 2008 | 451,546 | 1296 | 9118 | 750,977 | 445,949 |
The chart above shows an increase of 9,329 Democrats and a decrease of 11,682 Republicans.
Percentages
| Date | Democrat | Reform | Libertarian | Republican | Unaffiliated |
| Dec 27, 2006 | 26.58 | 0.09 | 0.56 | 45.83 | 26.95 |
| Jan 28, 2008 | 26.51 | 0.09 | 0.56 | 45.42 | 27.43 |
| May 14, 2008 | 27.18 | 0.08 | 0.55 | 44.94 | 27.25 |
| Sep 2, 2008 | 27.22 | 0.08 | 0.55 | 45.27 | 26.88 |
Since new Unaffiliated voters were the largest category, but the total of Unaffiliated voters dropped, exiting Unaffiliated voters must be changing political parties. Analysis of party changes by existing voters has not been attempted.
In the next few days the Meadowlark will publish charts like above for each county, state rep and state senate district.
Methodology: Voters with a registration date after 12/31/2006 were extracted from the Sept 2, 2008 list of registered voters in Kansas, ONLY if they had no other August or November voting history (other than the Aug 2008 election). Unfortunately, some county clerks change the registration date if anything about a voter’s record is changed, and this method of selection ignored “old” voters. For this analysis, registration dates in the future (e.g., 5/27/2018, 8/13/2070, 1/8/2520, and 8/1/6200) were set to the date of the file, 9/2/2008. [NOTE: The Kansas Secretary of State REFUSES to act on most data problems reported in voter registration data -- there is no known way to give the Kansas Secretary of State feedback so problems in the data file can be fixed.] Registration dates were converted to week index values within a year, and counted by week. A cumulative sum of all weeks was computed and plotted.
