n modern elections, the candidate who can turn out the bigger base is usually the winner. Put differently, the campaign with better voter data holds the trump card.

For more than a decade now, Democrats unquestionably have owned that trump card and used it to carve deep inroads into once solidly red states such as Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia, while Republicans have looked on in bafflement. It's no secret why the Left is winning elections despite shrinking in the polls: They register new voters in droves, and conservatives do not.

More than 160 million people cast a ballot in the 2020 election. Yet there may be as many as 60 million more eligible-but-unregistered individuals (EBUs) out there—people who could lawfully vote but may not until they register in their state. They're typically hard to reach and politically disinterested. Yet the party that can tap into this electoral goldmine—that is, identify and reach these potential voters—would be unbeatable.

For years, that party has been the Democrats. It may soon be the Republicans. Here's why.

Permanent Democratic Power

In 2010, the Supreme Court ushered in a torrent of new political spending through its Citizens United v. FEC decision. "Progressives" who were convinced that big business would back Republicans to the hilt saw doom written on the wall. To counter this Republican tide, groups such as the Brennan Center proposed adding "millions of new voters onto the rolls through a modernized registration system—starting in 2010."

In short, they needed to balloon the Democratic Party's ranks to survive a GOP onslaught—an onslaught that never came.

"Voter registration modernization" proved a euphemism for inserting operatives into state election machinery. But EBU data is protected behind layers of federal privacy laws and across multiple state agencies (e.g. motor vehicle departments) and thus not available to political groups. It was Pew Charitable Trusts, a powerful left-of-center funder, that discovered the back door.