By Saira Bajwa

Enthusiasm during the Democratic primaries drew millions of new voters to the polls

With voter registration deadlines only days away for many states and coming Oct. 10 in New York, the push to register voters has been intense and may come as an advantage to Democrats across the country.

Once known as a Republican stronghold, even Nassau County has followed recent national trends giving Democrats a lead in the number of registered voters. The New York State Board of Elections shows a Republican lead just months ago, but as of Tuesday, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 118 voters.

However, the nation’s only poll to focus exclusively on suburban voters, taken by the University’s National Center for Suburban Studies, found a six-point lead for John McCain, who led his Democratic counterpart 48 points to 42 points when the poll was taken in mid-September, before the financial crisis. The poll sampled 1,526 adults, 1,033 of them living in the suburbs.

“They [suburban voters] tend to be socially liberal, fiscally conservative and averse to extremism from the right or the left,” said Lawrence Levy, the executive director for National Center for Suburban Studies, on Sept. 29, when the poll was published.

The surge of Democratic voter registration occurred across the nation, with four million newly registered Democrats in key swing states within the past year alone. States like Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada are reporting large registration gains over Republicans.

Democrats in Florida registered almost twice as many voters as did the Republicans. Experts in North Carolina predict a chance of Democratic victory for the first time since the 1970s.

The protracted Democratic primary season has been cited as the main reason for the surge in registration. The drawn-out battle that spanned all 50 states, as well as territories abroad, drew almost 37 million Democratic voters to the polls. The biggest boost may have been in Pennsylvania, where thousands of independents and Republicans switched their affiliation to Democratic in order to vote for Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.).

Republicans expressed their doubts. “It really depends on whether these people actually come out to vote on Election Day,” said Sean Nabi, the president of the University’s chapter of the College Republicans.