Voter Turnout

[skybridge]

How could this year's voter turn-out be so insignificantly larger than 2000's?

[JNB]

 Simpily put, the Democrats turned out their base like never before, they threw everything they got into this election, from the university campus' to union get out the vote efforts, not to mention GW Bush giving the Democrats quite a few issues dealing with "free trade" and job outsourcing. All and all, the Democrat voter drives were a great success and they had more votes than they expected.

  That said, the GOP had a ground game like never before, and while I wont say it was all Karl Rove, but for the most part, what he did worked. OH should have been a Kerry state, I thought it was going to be a Kerry state because of how badly the state has been doing economically, but as it turned out, the GOP GOTV machine worked far better than the Democrats. NV is another example, despite how record setting the registration efforts of the Democrats were there, same with NM.  MO is also not in that great of shape economically, but the end result was a 7 point Bush win, and WV was a complete embarassment for Kerry.

   The end result is for at least now, the sure fire belief in American   politics, that higher turnout helps Democrats is dead.

[skybridge]

But before the election, the one thing it seemed anaylists on both sides could agree on was that 2004 would be marked by high voter turnout. Although more people voted than in 2000 the graph on this site for 2004 shows no significant increase.

[??????????]

The end result is for at least now, the sure fire belief in American   politics, that higher turnout helps Democrats is dead.

This "belief" was never correct in the first place.

[minionofmidas]

The end result is for at least now, the sure fire belief in American   politics, that higher turnout helps Democrats is dead.

This "belief" was never correct in the first place.

Yeah, but now it's not going to be held anymore.
Although I don't think it's all wrong.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The end result is for at least now, the sure fire belief in American   politics, that higher turnout helps Democrats is dead.

I personally think that had turnout been the same as 2000 Bush would have won by a large margin