Monday marked National Voter Registration Day and local organizations and officials are preparing far ahead of November.
Just past the main entrance of the Saratoga Springs Public Library, two volunteers from the local League of Women Voters chapter are running a table to register voters.
It’s a slow Tuesday morning but Giovanna DeFilippi isn’t letting it get her spirit down.
“But, you know, we are trying to reach as many people as we can. We thought it would be a lot more young moms but whoever we contacted, they were already registered which is a good thing,” said DeFilippi.
The LWV will be running similar efforts to register voters across Saratoga County all week.
DeFilippi says they’re trying to get voters connected with local issues.
“Yeah, we are trying to send a message to be engaged at the local level because a lot of people go out when it’s the big election but at the local level a lot of people say ‘oh, it doesn’t matter, everybody is the same,’ that kind of attitude. I think it’s kind of everywhere in the United States, not just this region, because the turn out in the election [in the United States] is much, much lower than in Europe, for example,” said DeFilippi.
Christopher Mann has been a Political Science Professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs for 11 years and studies elections and voting trends.
He says while it may be too early to tell what downstream impact recent political turmoil may have come November,
“The sad truth is that the people who are paying attention to those kinds of events are not driving voter registration. They are people who are, for the most part, engaged, they’re registered, or they’re paying attention and they’re so disaffected by politics that they have chosen not to register and they’re not going to change their mind,” said Mann.
Mann says issues like nationwide immigration raids, new partisan congressional maps in Texas and California, and recent instances of political violence may not have that much of an effect on the average voter.
“There’s a big group in the middle that is telling pollsters that they’re not paying much attention and that will come as a shock to the people who are either thrilled or outraged every day. But it’s those people tuning in, when we’re talking about voter registration, those are the people who have moved or haven’t updated their voter registration or are newly tuning into politics as they’re turning 18. And those are what drive voter registration trends. And the truth of where we are is that none of these events that are a big deal in the politically engaged portion of the population, they aren’t breaking through yet,” said Mann.
In Saratoga County, however, Republican County Elections Commissioner Joe Suhrada, who also serves as the head of the county’s GOP Committee, is headed into election season with confidence – there are 64,000 registered Republicans, 53,000 registered Democrats, and 53,000 voters who are not affiliated with either party.
“So, there’s that vast middle that those voters, they flip back and forth. And they also seem not to like Donald Trump as much as the Republicans, which is apparent by the totals he received, he fell shy of winning [in the county]. However, they tend to vote Republican on the local level. My theory is they are fiscally conservative and socially moderate,” said Suhrada.
Donald Trump received just under 49% of the vote in Saratoga County in 2024.
