November 07, 2008
The Tidal Wave that Wasn't: No Historic Turnout to Elect The One
Here's a report that runs counter to conventional wisdom. It claims that a) voter turnout was not larger this election than the last election (within a 1% difference); b) Democratic turnout was only 2.5% higher than it was in 2004; c) Republicans turned out in slightly smaller numbers than in 2004, by 1.4%.
What this seems to mean is that all those energized Democrats who gleefully went to the polls to elect the Messiah -- and who The One claimed are a new electorate -- would have turned out to vote anyway. The cultish behavior of Obama's followers may be new, but not their electoral behavior.
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.And given that Republicans turned out in smaller numbers, I wonder what this says about the argument that they had to run a moderate?“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.
