Despite widespread predictions of record turnout in this year’s presidential election, roughly the same portion of eligible voters cast ballots in 2008 as in 2004.
Between 60.7 percent and 61.7 percent of the 208.3 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, compared with 60.6 percent of those eligible in 2004, according to a voting analysis by American University political scientist Curtis Gans, an authority on voter turnout.
He estimated that between 126.5 million and 128.5 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, versus 122.3 million four years ago. Gans said the gross number of ballots cast in 2008 was the highest ever, even though the percentage was not substantially different from 2004, because there were about 6.5 million more people registered to vote this time around…
…In 2004, turnout was 6 percentage points higher than in 2000. But Gans said he believed it did not spike more this year because fewer Republicans went to the polls. While it may be premature to draw conclusions, Gans said, it appeared that Republican voting declined 1.3 points, to 28.7 percent of the electorate, while Democratic turnout rose from 28.7 percent to 31.3 percent of the electorate.
The Democratic increase struck some analysts as modest, considering the party’s immense get-out-the-vote operation, strong anti-Bush sentiment and Obama’s popularity.
“It sort of calls into question some of the vaunted ground game discussion, the whole turnout machine,” said a Democratic strategist who did not want to be quoted by name criticizing Obama’s campaign. “The GOTV effort was redoubled in 2008 compared to 2004, but it did not seem to make that big of a difference.”
Not quite the sweeping victory for liberalism our leftwing friends are claiming. Now the stories about Obama’s paid “volunteers” (who seem to have went at least temporarily unpaid) massing in droves to back his candidacy take on the look of, well, nonsense. Here are some States which had a decrease:
Ohio: 5,379,765 in 2008, 5,722,443 in 2004, 6% decrease.
Indiana: 2,286,760 in 2008, 2,468,002 in 2004, 7% decrease.
Alaska: 223,258 in 2008, 312,598 in 2004, 29% decrease.
The Alaska number is especially amazing given the hotly contested Senate seat plus having the Alaska governor on the ballot. For all the hoopla and hype and election day stories of massive turnout, its clear that it wasn’t like that at all – so why were we getting stories saying such was happening when it wasn’t? Some States (Florida, eg) had a big increase in turnout, but there are not enough actual turnout increases in battleground States to support the election day meme of high turnout. We were also advised that turnout might be as high as 150 million, about 30 million more than actually showed up – where did the high estimate come from?
What shapes up initially is a lack of enthusiasm for John McCain on the part of rank and file GOPers which could not be made up by merely having Palin on the ticket (and for all the lefty attacks on her, the rank and file GOP holds a very high opinion on her) – as in 2006, not so much a resounding endorsement of liberalism but a rejection of the GOP as its been over the past few years. A better GOP should be able to get those voters back to the polls and put a swift end to the Era of The One.
UPDATE: Haven’t been able to secure the complete vote for Illinois, but it appears that turnout in The One’s State only increased about 1% over 2004. Strange, huh? It was up a bit more than 2% in Arizona…which is still a small increase, all things considered, but beats Barry’s.
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