Recently, brooklynbadboy posted a diary noting that there's a 9.5 million vote deficit between Obama and Romney right off the bat. His point is that in 2008, 69.5 million people voted for Obama, vs. only 60 million for McCain.
That is to say, Romney has to find a way to do one of the following:
--Convince 5 million Obama voters to make the switch to Romney
--Convince 10 million people who didn't vote in 2008 to vote (for him)
--Convince 10 million Obama voters to sit this one out
--Use voter suppression efforts to prevent 10 million Obama voters from voting
--Some combination of all of the above
Now, all of this is true, but there's another angle to this where I thought he was going. Since he didn't, I figured I'd do so in my own diary. Consider the following.
--About 2.5 million people die each year in the U.S.
I'm going to assume that the vast majority of those are over 18; let's call it 2.2 million or so, or 8.8 million over 4 years.
There's about 230 million people over 18 total, of which 130 million voted in 2008, or about 56.5%. So, it's safe to assume that around 5 million of those voters will have passed away by election day.
Consider this: What was the average age of a McCain voter in 2008?
What was the average age of an Obama voter in 2008?
Add 4 years to each of those.
Now, I don't know what the ratio of McCain voter deaths to Obama voter deaths has been over the past 4 years, but I'd be willing to bet that it's along the lines of around 3:2.
If so, that means that about 3 million McCain voters will have died, vs. around 2 million Obama voters, which means the actual numbers are probably closer to:
2008 Obama voters still alive: 67.5 million
2008 McCain voters still alive: 57.0 million
...for a difference of 10.5 million, instead of 9.5 million.
I know this is a pretty grim thing to number crunch, but all of these things are factors.
Now, there's also the number of births each year, which is around 4.1 million; subtract total deaths from total births and you find that the voting age population is increasing by around 1.6 million people per year. However, those new additions are by definition going to be very young, which only makes my point stronger.
I know there's a zillion other factors at play; for instance:
--I don't know if any of the above numbers include non-U.S. citizens (the 11-12 million undocumented residents, plus documented ones who still can't vote)
--I don't know how many of the over-18-year olds are ineligible to vote for another reason like being in prison, mentally unfit and so on
--The death rate among minorities and the poor is higher than caucasians / the middle & upper class
...and so on. However, my point still stands.