Democrats allowed people to register to participate in their presidential caucus right up to the day of the caucus. Republicans had a cutoff date a couple of weeks out. We’ve all been waiting to see what the result would be on overall voter registration figures.

As of yesterday, my Senate District registration includes 25,039 Republicans and 24,616 Democrats, a Republican advantage of just 423. Six weeks ago there were 1,744 more Republicans than Democrats.

The net change in registration in my district was:

• Democrats, + 1,120
• Republicans, -201
• Non partisan, -253
• Other, -60
• Previously unregistered, 606

How these changes will translate to voting decisions and turnout this November remains to be seen, of course. But Dina Titus is likely to attempt to try to convince a candidate to run against me by pointing out that my challenger only has to win over 222 Republican voters in order to beat me.

There are problems with such an analysis.

For starters, most of the voters who changed registration became a Democrat from being non-partisan. The likely impact of that will be to increase the percentage of remaining non-partisans who vote Republican. All that has changed is that non-partisan voters who previously voted Democrat merely changed their registration.

And second, the largest source of new Democrats came from people who hadn’t been participating in the process. Let’s suppose half want Hillary and half want Obama. Half, clearly, will be disappointed in the outcome this spring. Their initial, tentative foray into politics will have turned out badly. Will they stick around to vote in November?

Here’s some Nevada history: in 1982, when Democrats clearly dominated statewide elections and voter registration, two Democrat candidates had a bitter primary for US Senate which was won by incumbent Senator Howard Cannon. Operating more from emotion than intellect, the Democrats’ deep divide never healed, and Nevada voters sent the Republican, Chic Hecht, to Washington.

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