Voters in Detroit on Election Day 2008. That huge voter turnout? Didn't happen

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.


He estimated that between 126.5 million and 128.5 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, versus 122.3 million four years ago. Gans said the gross number of ballots cast in 2008 was the highest ever, even though the percentage was not substantially different from 2004, because there were about 6.5 million more people registered to vote this time around.



The historic candidacy of President-elect Barack Obama, as well as the emphasis his campaign put on early voting and Election Day turnout, led many media and academic pundits to speculate that voter turnout this year would increase dramatically. In the run-up to the vote, even John McCain’s top pollster, Bill McInturff, joined other experts in predicting that turnout might surpass 130 million.

In 2004, turnout was 6 percentage points higher than in 2000. But Gans said he believed it did not spike more this year because fewer Republicans went to the polls. While it may be premature to draw conclusions, Gans said, it appeared that Republican voting declined 1.3 points, to 28.7 percent of the electorate, while Democratic turnout rose from 28.7 percent to 31.3 percent of the electorate.

The Democratic increase struck some analysts as modest, considering the party’s immense get-out-the-vote operation, strong anti-Bush sentiment and Obama's popularity.

“It sort of calls into question some of the vaunted ground game discussion, the whole turnout machine,” said a Democratic strategist who did not want to be quoted by name criticizing Obama’s campaign. “The GOTV effort was redoubled in 2008 compared to 2004, but it did not seem to make that big of a difference.”

Gans said that record disapproval of President Bush, the global financial crisis and surveys showing that three in four Americans believe the nation is on the “wrong track” contributed to the relatively high turnout this year.

“When you have that backdrop, you will get a rise in turnout, but it’s not durable,” Gans said. “We have a long-term disengagement problem that will not be solved by a singular election.”

But Obama's historic candidacy probably was responsible for bringing more youths to the polls this year, and it also helped explain what Gans said was the apparently significant rise in African-American turnout. Exit polls found that blacks constituted 13 percent of the electorate, a 2 percentage-point gain over 2004, Gans said; the increase may be even more than that, he said.

Still, some key states saw a decline in overall voter participation.

In Ohio, which has had aggressive GOTV campaigns in the past two presidential cycles, the number of voters appeared to decline from 5,722,443 in 2004 to 5,595,966 in 2008, according to the final but unofficial tally by the Ohio secretary of state. Turnout in those years dropped from 72 percent to 67 percent.

In Pennsylvania, 5,851,730 voters cast ballots with 99.8 percent of votes counted — a rise of nearly 690,000 voters over 2004, according its secretary of state. But due to higher registration, the percent of eligible voters who cast ballots dropped from 68.96 in 2004 to 66.8 this year.

Official turnout numbers are not yet available. Gans, whose calculations were based on the AP’s unofficial vote count and actual votes certified by a state’s chief election official, said that 22 states posted an increase in turnout. The largest increases were in North Carolina, where turnout rose 9.4 points, and Georgia, where it rose 6.7 points, he said. Both states have large black populations. The highest turnouts overall occurred in Minnesota, where nearly 76 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, and in Wisconsin, where 71 percent of those registered voted.

Voting in the past two presidential elections topped 60 percent — higher than in many previous cycles. The last time voter participation routinely broke 60 percent was in the 1950s and '60s. In 1996, barely half of voters cast ballots.

Nationally, the 2008 voter turnout was roughly equivalent to 1968 in percentage terms. Gans said that when taking into account the disenfranchisement of blacks, this year’s turnout was below the 1960 and 1964 presidential campaigns. For example, if blacks had been allowed to vote in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race, he said, turnout probably would have reached about 67 percent, as opposed to the official Federal Election Commission tally of about 63 percent.

Interestingly, Gans found that state efforts to make voting more convenient — for instance, through programs for early or mail-in voting — did not significantly boost turnout. Of the 14 states with the largest turnout increases, only six had so-called convenience voting initiatives, while in the 13 states with the greatest decline in voting, 12 had some form of convenience voting.