Turnout: Who Predicted 140 Million?
Mark Blumenthal | December 3, 2008
Topics: Turnout
Was turnout really less than the expert's expected? Perhaps, but not as much as implied by Bloomberg's Heidi Przybyla under the headline, "Obama Won Without Voter-Turnout Surge Experts Had Predicted" (emphasis added):
President-elect Barack Obama bet on an unprecedented surge of new voters to carry him to victory last month. He won without the record turnout.
About 130 million Americans voted, up from 122 million four years ago. Still, turnout fell short of the 140 million voters many experts had forecast. With a little more than 61 percent of eligible voters casting ballots, the 2008 results also didn't match the record 63.8 percent turnout rate that helped propel President John F. Kennedy to victory in 1960.
When I read this yesterday, I wondered: Who are the "many experts" that forecast a turnout of 140 million? I turned to Google and Nexis. So far, I can't find any.
Google the words "140 million" and turnout and you will find links to a number of stories claiming, in various formulations, that unnamed "experts" or "officials" were expecting a turnout "could approach a record 130 million to 140 million." Of course, if that is what the "experts" claimed, they were right. The final, certified count of the national popular vote looks to be at least 130 million, as Przybyla reports, and more likely closer to the 131 million that George Mason University's Michael McDonald now estimates (based on a combination of "final or certified county level election results within states that have not recently updated their state level reporting").
But I still can't find the "many experts" who "forecast" a turnout of a 140 million. The two true experts who get quoted most often on the subject are McDonald (who, full disclosure, is also a friend and an occasional commenter on Pollster.com) and Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.
In an op-ed published by Politico in late September, McDonald speculated about turnout:
The impending presidential election may be the election of a century. Record primary voting, floods of new registrations, more small campaign donors and highly rated political conventions show that people are intensely interested.
These indicators augur a high turnout. Undoubtedly, more people will vote than the 60 percent who turned out four years ago, which was the highest rate since 1968. The question is, how many more? If participation tops the 1960 level of 64 percent, then we must go all the way back to 1908 -- literally a century of American politics -- to find the next highest rate: 66 percent.
All McDonald confidently "predicts" here is a turnout of at least 60 percent. He was right about that.
Just before the election, however, in an article by the the Boston Globe's Brian Mooney, McDonald ups the ante a bit:
McDonald projects that 64 percent of eligible voters will cast ballots this year, exceeding the most recent high of 63.8 percent in 1960, the John F. Kennedy-Richard M. Nixon contest. Four years ago, turnout was 60.1 percent of eligible voters. Prior to 1960, the previous high was 65.7 percent in 1908, McDonald said. In that election, before women could vote, William Howard Taft defeated William Jennings Bryan.
With about 213 million Americans eligible to vote this year, a 64 percent turnout would mean about 136 million votes cast in the presidential race, compared with a 60 percent turnout of eligible voters in 2004 and 123 million votes cast that year, according to McDonald's United States Elections Project website.
So yes, McDonald's final prediction, at least as reported by Mooney, was a bit high [but see McDonald's comments in the update below]. Still, 136 million, though certainly a bigger number than 131 million, is not quite 140 million.
Curtis Gans may have been the one who first floated "140 million" figure, although not because he was predicting that level of turnout. An early October post on the Chicago Tribune Swamp blog reports Gans skepticism of a looming record turnout:
So will the general election turnout reach the historic volume that has been foreshadowed?
Unlikely, says Gans.
1960's turnout -- 67 percent of eligible voters -- is the figure to beat, and would require nearly 140 million Americans to cast a ballot, he says in the report. To put that in perspective, 122 million people headed to the polls, meaning that turnout would have to increase by 18 million voters to break the record.
Obviously, Gans did not expect a turnout of 140 million. A Roll Call editorial that appeared just before the election (found via Nexis) was more specific about Gans' prediction:
It would take turnout of 140 million to match the all-time record of 65 percent in 1960, according to Curtis Gans, director of the American University Center for the Study of the American Electorate, whose guess is that 2008 will come in at 61 percent to 63 percent.
It is worth noting that Gans and McDonald compute turnout percentages differently, and may have come to different conclusions about what number of voters it would have taken to match the turnout from 1960. Gans calculates turnout using an estimate of the voting age population (VAP) in the denominator. McDonald prefers to use his the voting eligible population (VEP) his own estimate on the number of adults eligible to vote (more details here).
Either way, the bottom line is that the predictions from both Gans and McDonald were reasonably close to each other and to the actual result. More important for this topic, neither predicted a turnout of 140 million.
So who did? Is there any basis for the claim of a "forecast" by "many experts" of a 140 million turnout?
Update - Michael McDonald emails with more:
I tried to place caveats in all my discussions with reporters that a 63.8% turnout rate was a possibility, not a certainty. I spoke with hundreds of reporters, so I fault myself for not being clearer to Brian Mooney from the Boston Globe that the word "will" should properly be "might." Indeed, as the election neared, I speculated to many reporters that the increasingly likely Obama victory might actually depress turnout from what we might otherwise see if the election outcome was uncertain. We will have to look into this more deeply in the months ahead, but it stands to reason that less enthusiastic Republicans would be disproportionately affected by an likely impending Obama victory, leading to fewer Republicans willing to volunteer for McCain, a less effective ground game for his campaign, and ultimately lower turnout among Republicans that would lower the overall national turnout rate.
One final word: not only will we most likely exceed 131 million votes for president, the total number of votes cast including blank and spoiled ballots will exceed 132 million. An aspect of the election that we will have to ponder is the aftermath is the 500,000 to 750,000 mail-in ballots that were rejected.
By Mark Blumenthal | December 3, 2008 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)
Comments
I'd argue somewhat differently. It's not quite that Republicans didn't turn out. Looking carefully at Cook County results, for instance, it looks more like poor and working class whites and hispanics didn't turn out in large numbers. This is a demographic (or two demographics) that have been very mixed for a couple decades. I think you were seeing people unwilling to vote for the Republican, but also unwilling or unexcited about voting for Obama, whether because he was black, or for whatever reason.
Republicans turned out reasonably well -- but Obama took some of those votes. That's one reason he didn't have larger coattails. If it was simply a matter of the Republican vote being suppressed, you'd expect that someone like Martin in Georgia might have won in the first round.
This means that Obama, at least temporarily, has pushed the Democratic coalition even further from the Roosevelt coalition.
There are two paths he could follow. One is Pres. Clinton's path of consolidating his hold on the upper middle class and respectable opinion, while holding an enormous share of the black vote.
The other would be the path that Mayor Harold Washington pursued - economic liberalism to reconstitute the Roosevelt/Daley pere working class coalition, pulling in enough working class whites to make reelection secure.
My guess is that Barack is in fact an upper class Democrat. That despite a few years of organizing, that most of his instincts come from his actual background as a kid at prep schools, Harvard, law schools and Hyde Park.
Some of the terms I'm using seem loaded, so I'm trying not to freight them with too much. I do wish he'd pursue a course of economic liberalism, but I think NAFTA liberalism is closer to the mainstream of Democratic party thinking these days. I just wonder if we'll ever again see a Democratic party that primarily represents working people. And if not, is it conceivable that Republicans could transmute themselves from a party of white working class social concerns to a party that takes working class economic concerns seriously (that seems awfully dubious, but ...)
But perhaps that's the strength of American democracy - that rather than a class based party system, we've normally had a system of two upper-class parties that chose different segments of the working class to support. One thing that isn't commonly noted about Johnson's understanding of civil rights and losing the south for a generation is that he had essentially worked out a trade - Republicans had been the party of the black working class for most of the previous century.
Well, a few seconds on Google and I ran across this at the Chicago Daily Observer.
http://www.cdobs.com/archive/our-columns/russ-stewart-and-tom-roeser-predict-the-elections,1979/
[quote]...here are the Nov. 4 prognostications of conservative radio talk show host Tom Roeser and longtime Nadig Newspapers political analyst Russ Stewart: The 2008 election will elicit the highest voter turnout in history. Voters are angry, anxious, fearful, wrathful and mournful.
They want a “way out” of the mess. They want to eradicate all memory of the Bush Administration. They want to bring back the happy days of Bill Clinton.
That is apparent with unprecedented early voting numbers. Those voters can’t wait to make a statement. And they’re not voting Republican.
In 2004, nationwide turnout was 122 million. In 2008, it will hit 140 million. [/quote]
I've run across a few blogs where a desire to see it hit 140 was expressed too.
Hi (this is my first post),
I get a little frustrated to see some of the commenters in "turnout" and "polls vs actual results" threads drawing conclusions based on incomplete and badly outdated (as of Dec. 4) election results reported by news media sites such as CNN. There were a lot of provisional and absentee ballots, and some states aren't quite done counting even yet.
Wikipedia is the best source I've found for accurate, up-to-date, national and state-by-state election results. (I've checked the Wikipedia numbers against Secretary of State websites for many states to verify that they match up.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2008
For example, the numbers in the post by RS can be updated, based on the still-incomplete Wikipedia results:
Comparing the absolute votes in 2004 (final) and 2008 (Wikipedia as of Dec. 4, 2008:
2004: Bush 62.0; Kerry 59.0 (millions)
2008: McCain 59.8; Obama 68.8
Difference: R -2.2; D +9.8
I think it's entirely plausible that 3.5% of Bush 2004 voters, or 1.8% of the total 2004 electorate, switched to Obama. A comparison of the 2004 and 2008 exit polls (CNN is good for those) shows that, for example, self-described moderates split 45%/54% for Bush/Kerry in 2004 but 39%/60% for McCain/Obama in 2008. Self-described independents split 48%/49% for Bush/Kerry but 44%/52% for McCain/Obama.
Oops, further correction. Even I have trouble dealing correctly with these large, late additions to the vote totals!
2004: Bush 62.0; Kerry 59.0 (final)
2008: McCain 59.8; Obama 69.2 (Wikipedia/Dec. 4)
Difference: R -2.2; D +10.2
@lhr:
Thanks for the updated numbers. The point I was trying to make is that even if all of Bush voters came out to vote, and some voted for Obama, the Democrat's vote still went up by another 4+ million (by your numbers, 8 million?) I posit it is unlikely that all new registrants and folks who didn't vote in 2004/2000 were all Democratic voters.
So if the Republicans had chosen a more enthusing candidate (beats the heck out of me who that would be), the polls might have been tighter, and the Republican turnout would have been higher, probably by a few million. That's all.
By the way, I would NOT rely on exit polls too much. There's the enthusiasm/response bias, polling location bias etc...
p.s. Mark B: I still have trouble signing in via TypePad... The sign-in gets lost between the "preview" and "post" commands. I am using Google Chrome...
My question is off on another tangent, but here it is: just what IS the all time American voter turnout record? Relatedly, why are several different numbers quoted above as if they are the record numbers? And finally, I tremble for my country when I recall that a recent Israeli election had a "disappointingly low" 71% turnout. Where is the USA compared to other democracies in voter turnout? Thanks in advance to all for your replies.
I agree with Professor McDonald that the Republican vote just didn't turnout. Despite the media's (and in particular, Zogby's?!) determination to make the race sound closer than it really was, the writing was pretty much on the wall towards the end.
Comparing the absolute votes in 2004 and 2008 (from CNN):
2004: Bush 62.0; Kerry 59.0 (millions)
2008: McCain 58.3; Obama 66.9
Difference: R -3.7; D +7.9
[2000: Bush 50.5; Gore 51.0]
Despite an increase of 7.9 million votes for the Democrat, the Republican vote went down by 3.7 million. How many were switchers - maybe a million or two?
Now, I don't think we can tell quantitatively what difference the Obama ground game made, but I'd like to think it had a large part to play (so my efforts were not in vain!) After all, to make those 3.7 million to not just not-vote for McCain but to vote for Obama, and then to make (at least) another 4.2 million come out and vote for Obama... that does require some work, right? :-)
Anyway, off the soapbox. I'll just blame depressed Republicans for the lower turnout - after all, comparing the last three elections, the Democrat's vote has only increased by leaps and bounds!
Posted on December 3, 2008 8:29 PM