Suppose you are a registered Democrat living in Alabama and switch your party over to Republican. If you are like most people, you are probably not going to run out to the DMV and ask for your voter registration card back just so you can erase the x mark next to "Democrat" and check "Republican".
You are simply going to start voting Republican and saying that you're a Republican in public opinion polls. Which is why voter registration should be taken with a grain of salt. Change in that department is even more glacial than the Republican re-alignment in the South that took place 1964-2004.
True up to a point, but even if (say) 5% of Democrats in any of those states are "really" Republicans, Democrats would still vastly outnumber Republicans in all of those states.
The reason why I brought this up, was because danwxman said:
Now, unless there's a new meaning to "partisan", if this were true, Kerry would have won landslides in all four states.
He didn't, so it isn't.
True, but can the Democrats do a complete 180 and suddenly go back to the party that they were in 1968? To do so would require a very left-wing economic policy, basically a resumption of the war on poverty, etc. On the other hand they would have to virtually abandon key social issues like abortion. While the elimination of social issues might benefit Democrats, reality is that now that that can of worms has been opened, it will not just go away.
That is the only way I can see of them ever re-gaining those votes, but it's unlikely ever to happen. It's more likely that those registrations are just ghosts of the past, and are going to keep declining, slowly but surely.
