aught up in the surge of support for Senator John McCain, Massachusetts Democrats are seeking in droves to drop their party affiliation and cast ballots in the Republican presidential primary March 7.
Secretary of State William F. Galvin said his office has been swamped with thousands of phone calls from residents asking whether they can vote in the GOP primary.
Many are Democrats who want to cross over and vote for John McCain, who is aggressively wooing supporters across party lines, Galvin said. Others are seeking to register for the first time.
''This could influence the primary in a very dramatic way,'' Galvin said. ''In the past, they [unenrolled voters] haven't been that participatory.''
The phone calls started last Wednesday, one day after McCain trounced Texas Governor George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary, and have been ''overwhelming,'' coming at a rate of thousands a day, Galvin said. Even staff attorneys have had to drop their work to answer the onslaught.
Democrats who want to cast a ballot for a Republican candidate must change their party status to unenrolled or Republican by Feb. 16. Members of the GOP can do the same thing if they want to back a Democratic candidate.
Fran Westhaver, assistant clerk in the overwhelmingly Democratic Boston suburb of Milton, has seen Democrats ditching their party label.
Some may believe Vice President Al Gore has sewn up the Democratic nomination and are backing McCain because he is seen as having a chance of toppling Bush.
''I think people want a choice,'' Westhaver said.
In 1996, Massachusetts adopted the national parties' standards for presidential primaries, which allows independents to vote in either party primary but effectively registers them as a member of the party in whose primary they participate.
Since then, the numbers of unenrolled voters have swelled. And the state now gives those voters the option of unenrolling from a party as soon as they exit the booth, becoming independent again.
But not all states allow that flexibility. In New York and Delaware, for example, only party members can cast votes for candidates of the same affiliation during presidential primaries.
This year, the competitive races between Democrats Gore and former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, and especially McCain and Bush on the Republican side, are generating surprising interest among the nation's seemingly sleepy voters at primary time, when usually only party stalwarts are paying attention.
If New Hampshire is prologue, voters could turn out in huge numbers, make their decisions at the last minute, and support candidates that do not share their ideological leanings.
James Glaser, chairman of the political science department at Tufts University, said that, although Massachusetts is a ''strongly Democratic state,'' he believes voters will mimic their independent New Hampshire counterparts, who largely pulled the lever for McCain because they were exposed to him here through local media.
McCain's campaign, especially in recent days, is aggressively targeting moderate and reform-minded Democrats much the way Ronald Reagan - the senator's idol - did in 1980.
''McCain is a very compelling figure and we got a big dose of him in the New Hampshire primary. More than anybody else did,'' Glaser said. ''I don't agree with very much of what he said, but I loved him. He is a magnetic, exciting, authentic candidate, and he's so different from the offerings. He matches up really well against Al Gore. He matches up really well against George Bush, and he matches up really well against Bill Clinton.''
However, Glaser wondered, ''as a social scientist, I'd be interested to know if this is happening in other places as well.''
It is.
Just take California, a state where independent voters don't count toward delegate selection. Only party members can cast votes that truly matter there. In theory, McCain could win the popular vote there but lose the primary because of the rules.
So with nearly 19 percent of California's electorate registered as something besides Democrat or Republican wanting to have their vote count, McCain's ground troops launched a publicity campaign to get those ''others'' registered in one of the major parties - namely, his.
Although the evidence is still anecdotal, the results have been strong.
''We had thousands and thousands of indies and Democrats - or as McCain would say, Libertarians and vegetarians, wanting to have their vote count when they found out about this rule,'' said Ken Khachigian, McCain's top adviser in California. ''We set up a process to get at least 30,000 switches'' as of Monday's registration deadline. The San Jose Mercury News reported yesterday that, as of late Monday afternoon, 689 Santa Clara County voters had switched parties.
Khachigian said it's ''almost impossible to know'' if the campaign reached that goal, but the whole process has gotten a lot of attention. A popular radio talk show host even reregistered on the air.
''It's been a real phenomenon,'' he said.
