Say Anything Blog

I raised this issue the day after the election.  Back then the media was crowing about election turnout being well over 130 million.  But new studies indicate that it probably wasn’t any more than 2004.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – A new report from American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate concludes that voter turnout in Tuesday’s election was the same in percentage terms as it was four years ago — or at most has risen by less than 1 percent.

The report released Thursday estimates that between 126.5 and 128.5 million Americans cast ballots in the presidential election earlier this week. Those figures represent 60.7 percent or, at most, 61.7 percent of those eligible to vote in the country.

There were roughly 122.3 million voters in 2004, meaning this election is projected as a slight increase.  At best.  Adding up the number of popular votes Fox News tallied (so far) for Obama, McCain, Barr, Nader and Baldwin I come up with 122.9 million votes.  Again, just a slight increase over 2004 and not nearly the 130 million+ the media was predicting immediately after Obama’s win.

But that’s not even the most interesting part of this article:

“A downturn in the number and percentage of Republican voters going to the polls seemed to be the primary explanation for the lower than predicted turnout,” the report said. Compared to 2004, Republican turnout declined by 1.3 percentage points to 28.7 percent, while Democratic turnout increased by 2.6 points from 28.7 percent in 2004 to 31.3 percent in 2008.

Republicans weren’t very excited about their candidate.  Democrats were.  This plays right into the theory that Republicans lost because the conservative base was dispirited by Republicans who didn’t act like conservatives (looking at you, Senator McCain) and not turning out to vote.

And then there’s this:

“Many people were fooled (including this student of politics although less so than many others) by this year’s increase in registration (more than 10 million added to the rolls), citizens’ willingness to stand for hours even in inclement weather to vote early, the likely rise in youth and African American voting, and the extensive grassroots organizing network of the Obama campaign into believing that turnout would be substantially higher than in 2004,” Curtis Gans, the center’s director, said in the report. “But we failed to realize that the registration increase was driven by Democratic and independent registration and that the long lines at the polls were mostly populated by Democrats.”

With all of the fraudulent registrations filed by Obama’s former employers at ACORN it’s little wonder actual turnout didn’t match up with registrations.