One step down, one to go. As Lou Agre said last night, voter registration just keeps on climbing:

Thousands of new voter applications flooded election offices around the state yesterday, with the number of Democratic voters already at an all-time record as Pennsylvania's registration deadline expired at midnight.

Final numbers won't be known until the end of the month, after county election officials have processed all the applications.

But registered Democrats in Pennsylvania already outnumber Republicans by an unprecedented 1.17 million voters - considered bad news for presidential candidate John McCain and everyone below him on the Republican ticket.

.......

In Philadelphia, what used to be a 5-to-1 Democratic registration edge as recently as last November, is now nearly a 6-to-1 Democratic margin. City election officials reported yesterday a total of 852,718 Democrats, 144,963 Republicans, 87,619 in other parties and 4,938 independents.

The numbers may still rise significantly before the Nov. 4 election as registrations are processed. Philadelphia's voter registration administrator, Bob Lee, said the city would process any new registrations delivered by midnight last night, or arriving by mail with postmarks of Oct. 6 or earlier. He predicted another 40,000 Philadelphia registrations by the end of the week.

The amount of people out there registering people to vote was crazy. Now, the second step begins.

Meanwhile, with McCain pulling out of Michigan, we can expect to see a lot of McCain and Sarah Palin over the next couple weeks, as they stir up racism and bigotry in their desperate attempt to win.