The Vorlon
Vorlon
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Posts: 4,653
Political Matrix E: 8.00, S: -4.21
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« Reply #1 on: December 05, 2004, 06:23:03 PM » |
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« Edited: December 05, 2004, 06:27:19 PM by The Vorlon »
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Actually, yes I think there was....
I am using the Data from Dave's site here, just so that it is totally consistent year to year...
In 2004 the % of the total Voting age population that turned out was 55.7% as of today (it may drift up a few tenths of a percent as the last return stagger in)
IN 2000, again using Dave's site and what looks like it was identical criteria (I presume) it was 54.5%
A great huge change of..... 1.2%.....
With the late late returns (over seas absentee, milititary, etc) it may drift up a few more tenths, but clearly there was no massive jump in participation...
Total Votes counted so far in 2004 => 121,333,814 Total Votes counted in 2000 => 105,417,258
Yes, 15,916,566 move votes were cast...
But the population of voting age increased from...
Population 18+ in 2000 => 193,376,975 Population 18+ in 2004 => 217,767,000
24.4 milliion more could have voted 15.9 million more actually did vote
The traditional metrics used to measure voter interest (self expressed likelyhood to vote, level of attention being paid, etc) were running dramatically higher than normal at various points in the campign (ie say April 2004 versus April 2000, September 2004, versus September 2000, etc)
Once we got to about Late September these "metrics" of voter interest were a good bit higher than the were on election eve in 2000, but after that they actually very modestly drifted downward. if anything. More people tuned out in October than tuned in as far as I can tell.
Another couple datapoints..
Registered Voters in 2004 : 157,778,756 Registered voters in 2000 : 157,063,553 (Data from Dave's Site again)
The change in the pool of registered voters was actually less than population growth. (This is Dave's data, I do want to check it, this seems a bit off to me actually)
You kept seeing all these news stories about how millions of "new" voters were registered, in actuality, virtually all of these were folks who were re-registered - Folks who had simply moved and go "signed up" at their new address.
I don't know if you noticed, but during the last month of the campaign boths sides just gave up on trying to reach out to "the middle" - it was ALL "get out the vote" and "charge up the base".
Everybody who was going to tune in, tuned in in June, the folks who tuned out, stayed tuned out.
From then end of the debates tillelection day the electorate was frozen - and almost nobody changed their mind either.
ABC News tracked Registered voters who said they were "certain to vote" in their tracking poll - this is the last month of thier data...
The trend is at best flat, perhaps a bit downward, over the last month.
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