Newsflash: There Was No Record Voter Turnout This Year
Immediately after Obama’s election we heard media types gushing about record turnouts. Well there’s a reason why we actually count the votes, because it turns out that in terms of the overall population no significant number of additional voters turned out to cast ballots for Obama than turned out to vote for President Bush in 2004.
Despite widespread predictions of record turnout in this year’s presidential election, roughly the same portion of eligible voters cast ballots in 2008 as in 2004.
Between 60.7 percent and 61.7 percent of the 208.3 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, compared with 60.6 percent of those eligible in 2004, according to a voting analysis by American University political scientist Curtis Gans, an authority on voter turnout.
Not that this really matters. The narrative the media has decided to go with after the election, indeed the one they likely decided upon well before the election, is “The One gets anointed” and no amount of fact or logic is going to distract from that.
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