With the seemingly limitless sources of political commentary, reporting and opinion out there, it’s a bit disingenuous to declare what the conventional wisdom about anything is. But a persistent line of argument maintains that Democrats in Florida stand to suffer because of A) the intensity, length and sometimes identity-based arguments of the Obama-Clinton campaign B) the dispute over Florida’s primary and delegates.

Votes and polling data will eventually prove or disprove that, but recent voter registration stats in Polk don’t seem to bear it out.

(This data was faxed to me from the Supervisor of Elections Office. I can’t find a link to it on its web site.)

Democratic voters outnumber Republicans in Polk County by 41 to 38 percent. But for years, many of those Democrats have either not voted or voted for Republicans. And Republicans over the years have steadily eroded the Democratic registration advantage. The county has become a reliable Republican stronghold.

But strange things are afoot. First there was a surge in independent and small party registrations. In 2006, I wrote a story detailing how, for perhaps the first time ever over an extended time period, a majority of new voters in Polk had registered as something other than Democrat or Republican. (The story seems not to have been permalinked. Sorry.)

That continued through 2007. Consider this: In March and April of 2007, an off-election year, new voter registrations broke down like this: 844 Democrats, 606 Republicans and 973 minor party or independent. The trend of more Democrats registering than Republicans seemed less significant.

But now fast forward a year to March of 2008. The new voter registrations break down this way: 1,560 Democrats, 1,038 Republicans, 1,080 independent or minor party. That’s 50 percent more new voters for Democrats than Republicans or others. I don’t have all the data for past years in front of me, but I would guess it’s been decades since conservative Polk County has seen new voter registration stats like this. The overall numbers, where March 2008 more than doubles all the registrations of March and April 2007, shows how much interest there is in this year’s campaign.

Now, it’s important to remember that there are 307,184 registered voters in Polk. These new registration trends are just a small portion of that. And there are still more Democrats switching to Republican and independent (391) than vice versa (355). But the March numbers were far closer and far smaller than the new registrations.

And the switchers from no party affiliation to Democrat (461) far outnumbered the switchers to Republican (273).

It bears watching.

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