A few other notes: I figured I’d call out Maine and Nebraska since both apportion electoral votes by district, meaning votes are more likely to “count” relative to winner-take-all states. Lo and behold, they are among the higher turnout states, at least relative to their respective trends.
Only the red/Trump/republican trend line is significant. It occurred to me these are a lot of states that the Voting Rights Act covered, and others in the deep south that have been passing a lot of voter suppression laws. So there’s could be some causal effect of people not voting because they live in a safe/bystander state, but could also be a causal effect of states becoming safe by virtue of limiting voter turnout.
Because most in the Deep South see through the charade of bourgeois US electoral politics.
Color me *shocked* that the bluer states also have higher turnouts /s
Just goes to show what we all already know: one party wants to make it easier to exercise your *right* to vote, and the other one wants to make it harder.
It’s interesting how close to competitive Texas is, combined with how low the voter turnout is. I bet if it voted like Florida it would look a lot more like Florida, a Republican-leaning swing state.
Very interesting data, and well visualized.
There are a couple obvious trend lines, but one that OP didn’t show is the confounder to everything: wealth. Poor whites are more likely to vote red, and poor people (and poor minorities in particular) are less likely to vote. And then there’s some causality and feedback loops in all directions – Republican policies suppress voting and also make their citizens poorer – so it’s really hard to tease apart the triangular chicken-and-egg problems.
* If you take a failing red state and drop in a functioning economy, will they stop voting red, or will they start voting in larger numbers first and then swing the election? Or neither? * If you instead mandate 100% voting in one of those states, would it suddenly go blue and then improve the state economy? Probably not, because in many of the most-failed states Republicans have absolute majority support anyway. * If you got Democrats in power by some miracle, would they be able to fix the economy and also increase voter turnout? That seems the most likely… but then why can’t they win?
It looks like competitive elections increase turnout *and* voter suppression policies reduce turnout. My understanding is that states like Colorado and Minnesota have some of the best pro-voting policies.
If you’re looking to run a diff-in-diff to estimate potential causal effects, I wonder if Arizona would be a good place to start. Historically, Arizona was once a leader in pro-voting policy but I believe they’ve backtracked on that in the last two decades.
So does that mean that if the republicans had more voters, then the democrats wouldn’t stand a chance? Seeing as how a lot of these elections usualy look very close.
That’s that voter suppression they’re all about, right?
Jesus, what’re the r values on those lines?
Minnesota is so based. Why can’t my state be that cool.
I gotta say, I do love how civically engaged the people of Minnesota are
![[OC] Election turnout is higher in competitive states... and lower in the deep south.](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/c9rsn9widiid1-1878x1024.png)
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Made in Tableau. Sources: [https://www.fec.gov/documents/4228/federalelections2020.xlsx](https://www.fec.gov/documents/4228/federalelections2020.xlsx), [https://election.lab.ufl.edu/dataset/1980-2022-general-election-turnout-rates/](https://election.lab.ufl.edu/dataset/1980-2022-general-election-turnout-rates/)
A few other notes: I figured I’d call out Maine and Nebraska since both apportion electoral votes by district, meaning votes are more likely to “count” relative to winner-take-all states. Lo and behold, they are among the higher turnout states, at least relative to their respective trends.
Only the red/Trump/republican trend line is significant. It occurred to me these are a lot of states that the Voting Rights Act covered, and others in the deep south that have been passing a lot of voter suppression laws. So there’s could be some causal effect of people not voting because they live in a safe/bystander state, but could also be a causal effect of states becoming safe by virtue of limiting voter turnout.
Because most in the Deep South see through the charade of bourgeois US electoral politics.
Color me *shocked* that the bluer states also have higher turnouts /s
Just goes to show what we all already know: one party wants to make it easier to exercise your *right* to vote, and the other one wants to make it harder.
It’s interesting how close to competitive Texas is, combined with how low the voter turnout is. I bet if it voted like Florida it would look a lot more like Florida, a Republican-leaning swing state.
Very interesting data, and well visualized.
There are a couple obvious trend lines, but one that OP didn’t show is the confounder to everything: wealth. Poor whites are more likely to vote red, and poor people (and poor minorities in particular) are less likely to vote. And then there’s some causality and feedback loops in all directions – Republican policies suppress voting and also make their citizens poorer – so it’s really hard to tease apart the triangular chicken-and-egg problems.
* If you take a failing red state and drop in a functioning economy, will they stop voting red, or will they start voting in larger numbers first and then swing the election? Or neither?
* If you instead mandate 100% voting in one of those states, would it suddenly go blue and then improve the state economy? Probably not, because in many of the most-failed states Republicans have absolute majority support anyway.
* If you got Democrats in power by some miracle, would they be able to fix the economy and also increase voter turnout? That seems the most likely… but then why can’t they win?
It looks like competitive elections increase turnout *and* voter suppression policies reduce turnout. My understanding is that states like Colorado and Minnesota have some of the best pro-voting policies.
If you’re looking to run a diff-in-diff to estimate potential causal effects, I wonder if Arizona would be a good place to start. Historically, Arizona was once a leader in pro-voting policy but I believe they’ve backtracked on that in the last two decades.
So does that mean that if the republicans had more voters, then the democrats wouldn’t stand a chance? Seeing as how a lot of these elections usualy look very close.
That’s that voter suppression they’re all about, right?
Jesus, what’re the r values on those lines?
Minnesota is so based. Why can’t my state be that cool.
I gotta say, I do love how civically engaged the people of Minnesota are
In red states election turnout is low by design