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NEW PARTY REGISTRATION figures released by the secretary of state’s office once again show Massachusetts party membership withering. The newly released data show about 62,000 fewer party members compared to 2025 data, continuing the slide that began in 2020. At the same time, the number of unenrolled voters not affiliated with any party grew by over 220,000.

Contrary to what seems to be the gathering consensus, these trends do not reflect voters’ growing contempt for parties or distrust of institutions. Although party leaders and others regularly cite these factors as driving the decline in registration, there’s a much more prosaic explanation: What’s happening instead is new voters are being funneled into the “unenrolled” category due to the design of the state’s registration system.

In 2018, the Massachusetts Legislature passed a law automatically registering to vote any eligible resident who interacted with various state agencies. That includes anyone getting or renewing a driver’s license, applying for a state ID, applying for MassHealth benefits, or applying for health insurance through the state health connector. Crucially, these automatic voter registration systems do not collect party preference data at the time of registration, instead putting all new registrants in the unenrolled category. The system went into operation in 2020.

The result has been a predictable flood of unenrolled voters while new party registrants have slowed to a trickle. This has been happening since 2020, and it continues today, even while many of these same voters hold strong party preferences and partisan views and would undoubtedly register with a party if presented with a clear opportunity.

We can see a partial view of the impacts of automatic voter registration by looking at the Massachusetts state voter file and comparing party registrations in pre- and post-AVR years. As the chart below shows, Democrats tumbled to 19 percent of voters registering or reregistering since AVR, while Republicans are down to just 6 percent. Both of these are precipitous declines.

But it’s actually far more severe than this. A large, but unknowable number of these Democratic or Republican registrants are actually voters re-registering at a new address. When voters move within the state, they carry their party membership with them to their new address when they re-register. This has the effect of making it look like more post-AVR registrants are joining parties than actually are. Unfortunately, we do not have data that allows us to isolate only first-time registrants from the pre- and post-AVR periods.

The closest we can get is by looking at voters who turned 18 and registered in the five years since AVR, and comparing them to the cohort that turned 18 and registered in the five years before AVR began. Doing so produces the table below, which is perhaps the clearest display of the destruction AVR has brought to the Massachusetts parties’ membership. A full 87 percent of young, first-time registrants are unenrolled, a 23.5-point jump from immediately before AVR.

There’s another wrinkle. AVR is by far the most common way to register. According to a separate report from the secretary of state’s office, 75 percent of registrations between 2022 and 2024 were through the AVR system. But voters can still register at their local town halls, by mail, or online, all of which offer opportunities to join a party. It is possible, even likely, that what few new voters are registering with parties are using one of these methods, while new AVR registrants are almost entirely unenrolled. We don’t know for sure, as that level of detailed data does not appear to be tracked.

As voters leave the Massachusetts rolls, either through death, inactivity, or leaving the state, the party registration numbers will continue to decline. As voters join through AVR, the unenrolled number will continue to increase. What we are seeing is the result of a mechanism that is running unchecked. If left unchanged, it will end party registration as we’ve known it.

This outcome is not predetermined, even if we embrace the goal of registering voters automatically. There are ways to run AVR systems that are less destructive to party rolls.

In California, for example, eligible voters are also added to the rolls when they register for a driver’s license, just like in Massachusetts. Crucially, they are also asked for party preference, which does not happen in Massachusetts, where voters are sent a postcard at a later date telling them how to register for a party if they want to. The impacts are clear. For the four years of new registration data California has reported, party preferences for DMV registrants are nearly identical to overall state voter rolls. In fact, slightly more DMV registrants have chosen to register with a major party compared to the state’s overall voter population.

Here in Massachusetts, legislators have taken no action to plug the leak in their own party membership. Party leaders themselves responded to the release of new membership data without addressing the actual issue.

“Party registration is changing because Massachusetts is changing. Voters are looking for something different,” said Massachusetts Republican Party executive director Haley Jones, taking a swipe at one-party rule by Democrats. Meanwhile, Steve Kerrigan, chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, said “partisan politics has become a pretty ugly business,” and “[a]verage, everyday voters out there are trying to find leaders to vote for who are going to try to solve their problems.”

Why Massachusetts parties are allowing the slow-moving self-destruction to continue is anyone’s guess. One might imagine both parties would rather have more members than fewer. But without clear intervention, party membership will continue to evaporate, and not because of any choices voters are making.

Steve Koczela is president of the MassINC Polling Group.

Steve Koczela is the President of The MassINC Polling Group, where he has grown the organization from its infancy to a nationally known and respected polling provider. During the 2014 election cycle, MPG conducted...