With votes still counted, turnout in the 2020 presidential election has reached a 50-year high, surpassing the record set by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election, an extraordinary commitment in what amounted to a referendum on the leadership of the President Donald Trump.
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As of Sunday, the counted votes represented 62% of the voting-age population in the US That’s a 0.4 percentage point increase so far over the rate reached in 2008, when the nation elected its first black president. .
The sheer number of votes also set records, although that’s a less notable milestone given the country’s growing population. So far, 148 million votes have been counted, and Democrat Joe Biden won more than 75 million, the highest number for a presidential candidate in history. Trump received more than $ 70 million, the highest total for a losing candidate.
The numbers are sure to increase as election officials continue to count more ballots. But election experts and supporters are already debating the forces behind the boom in civic participation. Some pointed to the numbers as evidence of what happens when states extend the time and ways that voters can cast their votes, as many states did this year. Others pointed to the extraordinary great passions that Trump aroused, both for and against.
The result: the highest turnout since 1968, according to data from the Associated Press and the U.S. Elections Project, which tracks turnout. Experts believe that the 2020 rate could reach heights never seen since the early 1900s, before all women were allowed to vote.
“It’s hard to imagine we can get higher than this,” said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who leads the Election Project.
An Associated Press analysis shows that some of the largest turnout increases to date have occurred in states that liberalized their voting-by-mail rules. In two states where it expanded significantly, Montana and Vermont, turnout increased by more than 10 percentage points and more than 9 percentage points, respectively, from the previous presidential elections, enough to place states in the top 10. increases. Hawaii posted the largest share increase, an increase of more than 14 percentage points so far.
Texas, which did not expand voting by mail but gave voters additional time to cast the first ballots in person, saw a huge increase of more than 9 percentage points in turnout, from 50% to 59% of its population. citizen of voting age who went to the polls. .
Many of the states with the largest turnout increases, including Arizona, Texas and Georgia, were new battlegrounds in the presidential race, places where Democrats sought to mobilize new voters and shift Republican strongholds. Some analysts noted that the number demonstrated the effectiveness of voter organizing and outreach efforts.
“People vote when they are asked to vote,” said Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver.
But the record turnout, to the surprise of Democrats, didn’t always help them. The party lost House seats and failed to win enough Senate seats to take control of the upper house, which is now based on the runoff in Georgia. They also failed to remove a single state legislature from Republican control.
Those results undermine the conventional wisdom that Democrats benefit more from high turnout. It’s a theory even Trump embraced this year, when he warned of “voting levels” so high that “a Republican would never be elected again in this country.”
Democrats were excited about the massive early voting in places with normally underperforming constituencies, like Texas, “Our position in Texas has always been that, we are not a red state, we are a no-vote state,” said Gilbert Hinojosa, president. from the Texas Democratic Party, which hoped to take control of the Texas House of Representatives.
Instead, the Texas Democrats did not even come close, despite the jump in voting, they lost the presidential vote by 5.5 percentage points, failed to win any seats in Congress or regain ground in the state legislature.
The results caused some Democrats to question the party’s decision to inactivate its door knocks and reach out to voters in person for months, due to concerns about the spread of the coronavirus.
“Maybe we weren’t reaching the people we needed to persuade ourselves,” Hinojosa said. “I have to believe that that is much more effective face to face.”
It is still early to know exactly who attended on Tuesday. But Tom Bonier, a Democratic data analyst, analyzed data from three email states – Colorado, Nevada and Oregon – and saw sizable increases in younger, non-white voters, as well as other Democratic constituencies.
Calculating historical turnout rates is tricky due to changes in the ways voter records were kept when a larger portion of the population was not allowed to vote. The record rate predictions are based on records kept by McDonald, who has calculated the number of eligible voters each election year since its founding.
The Associated Press determined the current turnout rate by comparing the number of votes counted with the estimated number of current potential voters for the Election Project in the US.
Turnout was higher before 1920, when some women won the right to vote, because the number of people who could vote was less. That’s why McDonald and others believe that the 2020 election may exceed the 1908 high mark of 65.7%.
The highest turnout in the post-World War II era was in 1960, when 63.8% of eligible voters cast their votes, according to McDonald’s records.
The 2020 turnout records come after 2018 had the highest turnout of a midterm election since 1912. The two recent elections had one thing in common: the opportunity to send a message about Trump.
“He motivated the Democrats who hated him and the Republicans who thought he was better than most Republicans,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist.
That raises the question of whether the upcoming elections will attract as much attention or as many votes. “Without him at the top of the ticket, what does this look like?” Masket asked.
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Associated Press data editor Meghan Hoyer and Associated Press data journalist Angeliki Kastanis contributed to this report.
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