Democrats Challenge Reports of Voter Registration Short-Fall

They're slightly ahead of Republicans, but they blew a wad in the process

The Obama campaign is pushing back against a report that Democrats are struggling to register new voters, noting that they're well ahead where they were four years ago at this time and still have this fall's prime weeks of registration ahead of them.

The Boston Globe reported Thursday that the campaign's "costly" efforts to register voters are coming up short, and that comparisons of new registrations in battleground states show Democrats well behind where they were at the same point in 2008. In the first several months of 2012, the Globe found, Democratic registrations were up by a combined 39,580 in Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada. That's less than a tenth of the gains to voter rolls that Democrats had in the same period of 2008.