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Published: April 10, 2008 11:14 am
Pa. Republicans outline effort to reverse Democratic voter gains
By MARK SCOLFORO
Associated Press
HARRISBURG —
Pennsylvania Republicans on Wednesday outlined a strategy to reverse the tide of voters abandoning their ranks in favor of the Democrats.
Party leaders said they will kick off a statewide voter registration drive on primary day — April 22 — in a year that the intensely competitive race for the Democratic presidential nomination has prompted many Republicans to switch parties.
Republicans will be coordinating a grass-roots voter signup effort with county chairmen and have been negotiating with a firm that would pursue cases of fraudulent Democratic registrations. The state GOP will be providing lists of party-switchers for volunteers to contact, and officials said they expect to bring two out of five defectors back into the Republican fold.
State GOP chairman Robert A. Gleason Jr. of Johnstown said a minor element of his party’s strategy will be to go after people who are “double registered,” particularly those who would be positioned to illegally vote in both New Jersey and Philadelphia.
“We do want them back,” said John McNally, who is in charge of the initiative for the Republican State Committee. “I want to assure every Republican that our party plans to address this issue.”
As of Sunday, Democratic registration stood at 4.2 million, up nearly 8 percent since the November election. The state had 3.2 million registered Republicans, a drop of nearly 2 percent from the fall. Voters not affiliated with either major party numbered 943,000, a reduction of just over 4 percent.
Republicans said most of their decline consists of people switching to vote in the Democratic primary against Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., rather than for one of them.
Abe Amoros, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, said the Pennsylvania electorate began to move away from the Republican Party long before anyone knew that one party’s presidential nomination would remain hotly contested while the other would have been resolved.
Arizona Sen. John McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee.
“They have not hit the bottom depths of their valley just yet, in terms of voter response,” Amoros said. “This is the will of the people — that’s why this is such a positive trend.”
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