Voter Turnout

Turnout looks nothing like a flat line across the population. Put age, income, and education on a bar chart and the pattern repeats every cycle: older people vote more than younger people, higher earners vote more than lower earners, and college graduates vote far more than people without a high school diploma. Each factor works through the same basic logic. Older, wealthier, more educated people tend to have more stable lives, more experience navigating registration rules, stronger senses that voting matters, and more free time and resources to deal with the hassle of getting to a polling place or filing an absentee ballot.

Turnout also swings with the calendar. Presidential elections pull out the highest share of eligible voters because the race gets the most media coverage, the most campaign spending, and the clearest sense of national stakes. Two years later, in the midterm, turnout drops noticeably, often by fifteen to twenty percentage points, because there's no presidential race driving attention even though every House seat and a third of the Senate is on the ballot. This pattern connects turnout directly to the rest of political participation: parties, interest groups, and the media all pour more resources into presidential years, which feeds back into why those years draw more voters.

Turnout numbers depend heavily on what denominator you use. The voting age population counts everyone 18 and older, including noncitizens and, in some states, felons who've lost voting rights. The voting eligible population strips those ineligible people out. Because VAP has a bigger denominator stuffed with people who legally cannot vote, turnout calculated against VAP looks lower than turnout calculated against VEP, even for the identical election with the identical number of actual voters.