NextGen’s gaming push is only one of the many ways the pandemic has forced both parties to reimagine one of their core activities during any presidential-election year: registering new voters. The outbreak has eliminated all of the face-to face techniques that both sides usually rely on: door-to-door canvassing, setting up tables in college quads or Walmart parking lots, and sending out volunteers with clipboards to buttonhole attendees at political rallies.

The elimination of these traditional tactics is forcing organizers to shift almost completely toward online, mail, and phone efforts to reach new voters. Republicans are confident that will provide a tactical advantage to the GOP, because President Donald Trump’s campaign has invested so heavily in its digital operations—and some Democrats fear they may be right.

But after a year that began with predictions that turnout for the presidential race could reach its highest level in more than a century, both sides may struggle to meet their ambitious goals for identifying and registering new voters. In March and early April, new registrations plummeted in many states compared with the same period in 2016, according to new data provided exclusively to The Atlantic by TargetSmart, a Democratic voter-targeting firm. “Registration will almost certainly be diminished, potentially by millions of voters, when all is said and done,” says Tom Bonier, TargetSmart’s CEO.

Read: Brace for a voter-turnout tsunami

Though many observers assume that Democrats have the most at stake in expanding the electorate, studies have shown that nonvoters don’t express a strong preference for either party. White voters without a college degree, Trump’s core group of supporters, constitute a majority of all eligible nonvoters in seven contested swing states, and more than three-fifths of them in the battleground states across the Rust Belt specifically, according to a survey released last week by the Voter Participation Center, which focuses on registering minorities, single women, and other Democratic-leaning constituencies.

In those battleground states, the poll found that unregistered African American voters expressed more interest in voting than unregistered white voters did. But it also revealed that nonvoters overall held at least as negative a view of the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, as they did of Donald Trump. That suggests both sides are leaving a large number of potential voters on the sidelines as registration activities are disrupted, notes Page Gardner, the Voter Participation Center’s founder and board chair. These lost weeks, she says, are imposing “an incredible opportunity cost on both sides.”

Key Republican and Democratic institutions working on registration say they have not yet lowered their expectations. “We set out in the beginning of this year to register 2 million new voters, with a focus on registering people of color and to have a minimum of 30 million voter contacts,” says Alexis Anderson-Reed, the CEO of State Voices, which works with affiliates in 23 states to promote turnout among Democratic-leaning constituencies. “That is still our goal.”