How extreme?
"The phone doesn't stop ringing, for one thing," Dean said. "Secondly, my e-mail address is out on our Web site, and, well, I'm just not keeping up. We've also had a steady stream of people coming up to the counter as well, which is unusual."
Another quick measure: Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's campaign picked up 5,000 new-voter registration cards in Delaware County yesterday, Chief Clerk Mary Jo Headley said.
In a matter of hours, the coming primary registered as a seismic event in the years-in-the-making trend of the suburbs' edging closer to political parity.
Yesterday afternoon, Montgomery County's voter rolls lost 79 Republican registrants and gained 48 Democratic ones, further narrowing the registration gap there to about 21,600, less than 5 percent of the county's total.
That gap had been 30,000 in November and was more than 23,000 on Friday.
"Even before we realized that we're the game in many ways, it was clear that there was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm," Montgomery County Democratic chair Marcel Groen said.
In solidly Republican Chester County, Democrats are also making inroads. Since November, Democrats have registered more than 5,600 new voters, Republicans just 1,369.
In Montgomery County, interest in the primary has provoked some concern about the abilities of the machines that will count the ballots.
Montgomery is one of only two Pennsylvania counties using the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine, now the subject of an inquiry by the New Jersey Attorney General's Office over problems that arose in that state's February primary.
