I’ve noted in a few comments that the trend in votes for the Democratic presidential candidate since 2008 has a distinct trend downwards:
| Year | Democratic presidential votes |
|---|---|
| 2008 | ~ 70 million |
| 2012 | ~ 65 million |
| 2016 | ~ 60 million |
So there appears to have been a dip in democratic votes, but was this a low turnout election? There was a chart posted in this mornings APR that showed the votes for the 2 major candidates over the years, and looking at some data on the population estimates of the country I came up with some rough and dirty estimates that indicated that this election really didn’t seem like low turnout, especially compared to some other notable years (I think I looked at 1980 initially).
Compared to 2008 and 2012, yeah turnout looks depressed. But look at the chart that I’ve posted here. This election had better turnout (as measured as a percentage of the total population) than 1996 and 2000. In fact, this election is just about as average as you can get when you look at the presidential elections since 1960.
| Year | Population | presidential votes | % of population |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | 181 | 68.8 | 38.0% |
| 1964 | 192 | 70.0 | 36.5% |
| 1968 | 201 | 73.0 | 36.3% |
| 1972 | 210 | 77.6 | 37.0% |
| 1976 | 218 | 81.6 | 37.4% |
| 1980 | 227 | 86.5 | 38.1% |
| 1984 | 236 | 92.7 | 39.3% |
| 1988 | 244 | 91.6 | 37.5% |
| 1992 | 255 | 104.4 | 40.9% |
| 1996 | 265 | 96.3 | 36.3% |
| 2000 | 282 | 105.4 | 37.4% |
| 2004 | 293 | 122.3 | 41.7% |
| 2008 | 304 | 131.3 | 43.2% |
| 2012 | 314 | 129.1 | 41.1% |
| 2016 | 324 | 125.0 | 38.6% |
Now some caveats — I’m not sure that percentage of the total population is the best way to look at this, but it was an easy collection of data, and makes sense to me at a basic level. Of course these numbers are estimates and rounded, so if you repeat this you might get slightly different numbers. I know I did when I compiled this data compared to the “quick & dirty” first pass I made (I initially estimated the voter participation in 1996 as 31.5%), but I think you’ll find the same trend.
Compiling a weighted average of this data comes up with 38.9%, just a little bit more than the percentage from this election. So I think we can combine this with the initial data set showing democratic votes plummeting and conclude that we’re not getting the message out effectively.
Or maybe it’s just that the lies from the Republicans are just swamping out the message? If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. Is that what our politics has descended to?