Evan Thomas: Wrong on turnout

Writing in Newsweek, Evan Thomas bemoans the increase in partisanship, claiming it decreases participation among the masses:

[T]he real divide, the separation that may matter more to the future of American democracy, is between the political junkies and everyone else. The junkies watch endless cable-TV news shows and listen to angry talk radio and feel passionate about their political views. They number roughly 20 percent of the population, according to Princeton professor Markus Prior, who tracks political preferences and the media. Then there's all the rest: the people who prefer ESPN or old movies or videogames or Facebook or almost anything on the air or online to politics. Once upon a time, these people tended to be political moderates; now they are turned off or tuned out. Aside from an uptick in the 2004 presidential election, voter turnout has drifted downward since its modern peak in 1960 (from 63 percent to the low 50s), despite much easier rules on voter registration and expensive efforts to get out voters, writes Thomas Patterson, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the author of "The Vanishing Voter." For all the press hoopla over the coming presidential primaries, turnout rates are likely to dip way below 30 percent, he predicts.

It's axiomatic that democracies need an informed and engaged citizenry. But America's is indifferent or angry. Washington has entered an age of what Ken Mehlman, President Bush's campaign manager in 2004, calls "hyperpartisanship." Partisanship is nothing new, or necessarily bad—after all, it can offer voters clear choices. But it has become poisonous.

Josh Marshall objects, citing this post by Kos arguing that "the last election in which this nation lacked a partisan media was 1988, and turnout was 50.11%" but "with a strong conservative partisan media, and with a nascent progressive partisan media, [turnout] was at 56.69%" in 2004.

But we can go even further. Turnout hasn't declined at all once you take into account the increasing proportion of the population that is ineligible to vote, as George Mason political scientist Michael McDonald points out. In fact, it's increasing to the highs of the 1950s and 1960s:

[The idea that ever fewer Americans are showing up at the polls should be put to rest. What's really happening is that the number of people not eligible to vote is rising -- making it seem as though turnout is dropping.

Those who bemoan a decline in American civic society point to the drop in turnout from 55.2 percent in 1972, when 18-year-olds were granted the right to vote, to the low point of 48.9 percent in 1996. But that's looking at the total voting-age population, which includes lots of people who aren't eligible to vote -- namely, noncitizens and convicted felons. These ineligible populations have increased dramatically over the past three decades, from about 2 percent of the voting-age population in 1972 to 10 percent today.

When you take them out of the equation, the post-1972 "decline" vanishes. Turnout rates among those eligible to vote have averaged 55.3 percent in presidential elections and 39.4 percent in midterm elections for the past three decades. There has been variation, of course, with turnout as low as 51.7 percent in 1996 and rebounding to 60.3 percent by 2004. Turnout in the most recent election, in fact, is on a par with the low-60 percent turnout rates of the 1950s and '60s.

On the other hand, it is true that the public expresses a preference for moderation and suffers from widening inequalities in political information.

Comments

[Rob]

I think Professor Marshall makes a good point, but he would do well to refine his numbers a bit. To my understanding, it is not uniformly true that convicted felons are ineligible to vote. Eligibility varies from state to state. It is probably the case that all or nearly all states do not permit incarcerated felons to vote, but the eligibility of felons who are no longer incarcerated is more variable.

The more fundamental question is whether high voter turnout is necessarily desirable. When a country is stable, when the outcome of the election isn't likely to change the form of government or the nature of the economic system or the central elements of the society, then it is not surprising that many eligible voters don't much care about the outcome and don't follow the campaigns or bother to vote.

When we apply high-pressure tactics to make indifferent members of the electorate go to the polls, their choices are more likely to be made on arbitrary criteria (whose looks they like, whom they identify with in terms of race or religion or gender or region, etc.) than on informed decisions about the candidates and their positions. Having elections turn on the whims of indifferent voters is not, in my view, a formula for a successful democracy.

[Rob]

My previous comment should of course have referred to Professor McDonald. Confusing him with Josh Marshall was inexcusable.