The election was not a low-turnout election
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  The election was not a low-turnout election
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Author Topic: The election was not a low-turnout election  (Read 1568 times)
The Mikado
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« on: August 27, 2017, 05:27:46 PM »



Updated with final vote totals. I think it's a great rebuttal to the line that 2016 was a low turnout election. Not only was eligible voter turnout up even in a % form from 2012 (58% in 2012, 59% in 2016), but that meant that a whole eight million more votes were cast. Yet people keep on repeating this idea that somehow 2016 was super-low turnout despite being the third-highest turnout since 1968.

EDIT: Because Atlas doesn't agree with imgur for whatever reason:

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Mr. Smith
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« Reply #1 on: August 27, 2017, 06:16:42 PM »

Low? No.

Lower than 2012 or 2008? Yes.  By .2% actually
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The Mikado
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« Reply #2 on: August 27, 2017, 06:28:08 PM »


electproject.org disagrees and has VEP at 59.3 in 2016 vs 58.0 in 2012. http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout-data They're a pretty reputable source and it's run by a Poli Sci professor.

EDIT: Obviously still considerably down from 2008.
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MarkD
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« Reply #3 on: August 27, 2017, 09:36:38 PM »

There was definitely a lower turnout among African-American voters.
I live in MO-1. The population, according to 2010 census, is roughly 50% black and 47% white. In the 2012 election, I have counted 351,065 votes cast for President; 79.87% of that for Obama, 18.89% for Romney, and 1.24% for others (Johnson and Goode). But in 2016, the number of votes cast, according to my count, is 320,454. That's a drop of 8.6%. Clinton got 76.81%, Trump got 18.76%, and 4.43% were for the others (Johnson, Stein, Castle, and write-ins). The drop in the number of votes cast for the Dems was almost 34,000; the drop in the number of votes cast for GOP was about 6,000; and the increase in the number of votes cast for others was about 10,000.
I have also calculated the presidential votes within each State Representative District, of which there are about 36 (wholly or partially within MO-1). Districts 67, 68, 73-79, and 84-86 are the districts that are predominantly black. Those 12 districts are adjacent to one another, and collectively that region is 70% black. That's where the vast majority of the decline in voter turnout occurred. I calculated that in 2012, those 12 districts cast almost 210,000 votes. But in 2016, the number declined to about 182,300 votes -- a drop of 13%. There was a decline in the white-majority State Representative Districts within MO-1 too, but no where near as drastic. State Rep Districts 75 and 76 have the highest percentages of black residents in the entire state, and those two had the worst decline in voter turnout.

This was not unique to the St. Louis area. It was a national phenomenon.
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ahugecat
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« Reply #4 on: August 28, 2017, 09:43:22 PM »

2004's turnout always interested me. It had super high turnout but I can't figure out if it's because 1996 and 2000 had such low turnouts so it made 2004 look better or not.

2012 looked like it had low turnout - 129 million total votes, compared to 131 million in 2008. 2016 got 137 million votes.
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ProgressiveCanadian
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« Reply #5 on: August 29, 2017, 01:09:39 AM »

Millions of Sanders primary voters stayed home. Maybe being villainized by the Clinton campaign had something to do with it.
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« Reply #6 on: August 29, 2017, 01:27:56 AM »


electproject.org disagrees and has VEP at 59.3 in 2016 vs 58.0 in 2012. http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout-data They're a pretty reputable source and it's run by a Poli Sci professor.

EDIT: Obviously still considerably down from 2008.

2 party vote as a fraction of VEP was down, though.
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AN63093
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« Reply #7 on: August 29, 2017, 02:53:46 AM »
« Edited: August 29, 2017, 02:55:39 AM by AN63093 »

Nationally, you are correct.

However, turnout was down in some critical areas.  MI is a good example of this- Clinton was about 76k votes off of Obama from '12 in Detroit.  Now some of these voters may have flipped to Trump, but I would suspect not that many.  Trump's votes were only about 15k higher than Romney.

So even if every one of Trump's new voters flipped from Obama, that doesn't account for 60k votes.  For whatever reason, they didn't show.  Some of that would be accounted by the fact that Wayne County is losing population but it doesn't account for the entire 60k.

Had those voters showed up, MI would've gone D.

This is just one example.  So I think that although the election wasn't low turnout in general, it was lower in some key areas that may have lost the election for the Dems, and that's probably what gave birth to this myth.
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All Along The Watchtower
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« Reply #8 on: October 16, 2017, 12:57:10 PM »

The well above average of the number of third-party voters last year should be a clue.

Thanks for the thread, Mikado!
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #9 on: October 18, 2017, 09:15:41 PM »

The Mikado, keep in mind there was a lot of lazy journalism in the immediate aftermath of the election that didn't consider the considerable mail in vote in CA and the west coast and they rushed to the presses with lines about Trump winning because of lower turnout and that he got less raw votes than Mitt Romney did.


Neither of which was true. He got a lower percentage, but Trump got 2 million more votes than Romney and Clinton came close to matching Obama 2012 (was only off by 100,000 I think), and beyond that the substantial increase in third party voting, which was ignored.


So between the premature reports that didn't include the mail in vote, and ignoring the larger third party vote, lies the formation of this narrative.
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JonHawk
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« Reply #10 on: October 19, 2017, 05:46:59 PM »

Millions of Sanders primary voters stayed home. Maybe being villainized by the Clinton campaign had something to do with it.

Give it up already
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136or142
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« Reply #11 on: October 19, 2017, 06:02:28 PM »

The Mikado, keep in mind there was a lot of lazy journalism in the immediate aftermath of the election that didn't consider the considerable mail in vote in CA and the west coast and they rushed to the presses with lines about Trump winning because of lower turnout and that he got less raw votes than Mitt Romney did.


Neither of which was true. He got a lower percentage, but Trump got 2 million more votes than Romney and Clinton came close to matching Obama 2012 (was only off by 100,000 I think), and beyond that the substantial increase in third party voting, which was ignored.


So between the premature reports that didn't include the mail in vote, and ignoring the larger third party vote, lies the formation of this narrative.

Interestingly, Trump also received slightly less votes than the aggregate U.S House Republican vote total.
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #12 on: October 19, 2017, 09:32:17 PM »

The Mikado, keep in mind there was a lot of lazy journalism in the immediate aftermath of the election that didn't consider the considerable mail in vote in CA and the west coast and they rushed to the presses with lines about Trump winning because of lower turnout and that he got less raw votes than Mitt Romney did.


Neither of which was true. He got a lower percentage, but Trump got 2 million more votes than Romney and Clinton came close to matching Obama 2012 (was only off by 100,000 I think), and beyond that the substantial increase in third party voting, which was ignored.


So between the premature reports that didn't include the mail in vote, and ignoring the larger third party vote, lies the formation of this narrative.

Interestingly, Trump also received slightly less votes than the aggregate U.S House Republican vote total.

Mostly in CA and TX, probably, but yes. Anywhere a Republican ran ahead of the Presidential ticket, would add to that total. Likewise The trump Dem districts in the rust belt would also weigh on it, but there are more of the former than the latter.
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ahugecat
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« Reply #13 on: October 19, 2017, 10:09:03 PM »

The Mikado, keep in mind there was a lot of lazy journalism in the immediate aftermath of the election that didn't consider the considerable mail in vote in CA and the west coast and they rushed to the presses with lines about Trump winning because of lower turnout and that he got less raw votes than Mitt Romney did.


Neither of which was true. He got a lower percentage, but Trump got 2 million more votes than Romney and Clinton came close to matching Obama 2012 (was only off by 100,000 I think), and beyond that the substantial increase in third party voting, which was ignored.


So between the premature reports that didn't include the mail in vote, and ignoring the larger third party vote, lies the formation of this narrative.

That crap is so freaking annoying.

It's like they think counting stops after the first night or something. I knew Clinton would win the popular vote by over a million the day after (though got kinda embarrassed when it nearly hit 3 million lol).
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Pericles
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« Reply #14 on: October 19, 2017, 11:38:44 PM »

The Mikado, keep in mind there was a lot of lazy journalism in the immediate aftermath of the election that didn't consider the considerable mail in vote in CA and the west coast and they rushed to the presses with lines about Trump winning because of lower turnout and that he got less raw votes than Mitt Romney did.


Neither of which was true. He got a lower percentage, but Trump got 2 million more votes than Romney and Clinton came close to matching Obama 2012 (was only off by 100,000 I think), and beyond that the substantial increase in third party voting, which was ignored.


So between the premature reports that didn't include the mail in vote, and ignoring the larger third party vote, lies the formation of this narrative.

That crap is so freaking annoying.

It's like they think counting stops after the first night or something. I knew Clinton would win the popular vote by over a million the day after (though got kinda embarrassed when it nearly hit 3 million lol).

I have to agree with you there, people should wait until the full results are in and not rush to judgement before the full results are in. Same happened with the NZ election when people thought it was a done deal before the special votes came in and changed the game. Surely people can have some patience!
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Phony Moderate
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« Reply #15 on: October 20, 2017, 09:47:52 PM »

It's amazing how low turnout is in America, given how much people seem to be engaged (though admittedly I'm speaking from an overseas POV).

And if it didn't reach 60% last year (one of the contests of all-time), then it's hard to imagine it doing so in a Kasich vs. Klobuchar match-up or whatever.
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