Another presidential election cycle is in full swing here in the United States. In between all of the arguing of which candidate is the best choice -- or the lesser evil -- I have heard and read people talking about polling numbers and previous election results.
"Hillary has X% of Americans supporting her!"
"Trump should receive Y% of the votes!"
All of this got me thinking about a debate with some friends about voter turnout. The point that I brought up then, and will be publishing here, is the stagnant participation rate for voting in the United States.
In this first graph, I have charted out the U.S. population estimates as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau, making presidential election years my observation points:
The solid black line is the estimated total U.S. population. The red dot-dash line beneath it is the estimated U.S. voting-aged population. Finally, the blue dashed line at the bottom is the count of the U.S. population that actually voted. What stands out is the difference between the rate of increase in the population and the rate of of increase in those that vote.
This next graph shows the percentage of voting-aged population to the total population (top, sold blank line) and the percentage of those who voted to the total population (bottom, red dot-dash line).
It appears that the proportion of the population that votes is stable (stagnant?) when compared to the increase in the proportion of the population estimated to be of voting-age in the United States. Finally, to conclude this post on demographics, below is the percent of voting-aged population that actually votes. There is some volatility but it appears to be declining over time.
I have no preference in this year's election. I may actually join the ranks of those who fail to vote... who knows? And, while I think we will see a slight increase in voter participation in this election cycle, I think that the disturbing trend of decreasing voter participation will continue over the long term.
As usual, I will make the data and the R script used in this post available in my GitHub repository.
I will start working on my next post with the goal of returning my focus to economic topics, but you never know... the Philadelphia Eagles are looking pretty good this season.
Interesting outcomes in your analysis. That both the number that vote and those eligible to vote are (roughly) constant as a share of the total population, but the number that vote as a share of those eligible is clearly declining seems a bit counterintuitive. Not that the analysis is lacking but I am wondering what it would look like if there were more detailed, age separated data. If we believe the typical story it is the younger cohorts that do not vote, or at least do not vote in proportion to their larger numbers. You are correct that this could be an outlier election with increase participation; it is really hard to know though sitting here now.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it is something that deserves further attention. I plan on going back into the Census website and pulling the granular data to get the numbers broken down by categories such as age and sex.
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