I’ll be honest – I started Election Day feeling cautiously optimistic.
Obviously, that feeling as been proved way, way wrong. Now, its 2:30am,
I can’t sleep so I’ve been futzing with Excel and written a following
long piece on voting tendencies of different age groups.
Regardless of the eventual outcome in Ohio (which I am most certainly
not optimistic about) Bush has won the popular vote hands down – by a
significantly larger margin than he lost it in 2000. Any way you slice
that, it’s bad for Democrats. Even if Kerry wins Ohio – and the election
– he faces a hostile Republican majority in the Congress without a
national mandate and an increasingly conservative media ready to crucify
him at any turn. On the other hand, if Bush wins Ohio – as I expect will
happen eventually – then we get four “more of the same” years – and the
last four year were no picnic. And either way, the likely two week delay
in processing Ohio’s provisional ballots further divides what is an
already polarized electorate.
Right now, going back to blissful ignorance of politics is looking
mighty tempting. But I won’t do it. Instead, I want to get more involved
in issues I care about in order to affect change. For example, one thing
I’d like to see in the coming years is the election reform. I’m not
talking about abandoning the Electoral College – which isn’t going to
happen w/o a constitutional amendment that has almost zero chance of
passing. I’m talking about the changing the low voter turnout that has
plagued American elections for decades. Final results won’t be in for a
while, what with provisional and absentee ballots, but according to
CNN’s current numbers, around 110 million votes have been tabulated,
with 95% of the precincts reporting. That means there were around 116
million votes cast (plus the absentee and provisional votes that haven’t
been counted yet). However, the US population is estimated by the
Census
Bureau to be
around 295 million. Excluding the
estimated
25.7% of the population that is under 18, that leaves nearly 219 million
potential voters. Even with this year’s record turnout, we’ve only
managed to include 53% of the country in the voting process (maybe low
60’s after with the yet-to-be-counted ballots). While I understand it’s
every citizen’s duty to vote, it’s the government’s duty to enable the
citizens to do their duty. We should treat the turnout as a grade, and
53% is a failure.
I don’t expect election reform to be a priority of a Republican
administration or congress, as conventional wisdom states that larger
turnout favors Democrats. Of course, this election’s results fly
directly in the face of that idea. However, there are those blogs I read
that have
suggested that
Kerry lost the popular vote because the “much-ballyhooed youth vote
simply did not show up”. I thought this too – until I ran the numbers.
The most underrepresented age group in the election (according to the
national exit
poll)
was 18-29 years olds – 22% of the voting age population yet only 17% of
the voters in the exit poll. And that group overwhelmingly favored Kerry
54%-44%. By comparison, people 60 and older are also around 22% of the
voting population but represented 25% of the voters. Not surprisingly,
that group favored Bush 53%-46%. However, it’s interesting to note that
if the voter turnout age distribution had matched the actual census
distribution, Bush would still have won the popular vote 49.6% to 48.8%.
In the census-adjusted model, Kerry is negatively effected by the 30-44
age group, that favored Bush by four points and were under represented
in the exit polls – 32% of the voting population but only 28% of voters.
(In fairness, the exit poll isn’t completely accurate – based on the
voting turnout age distribution, it estimated a 50% – 48.5% Bush popular
vote win and we know Bush won by a wider margin than that. Furthermore,
as we are accutely aware, popular vote doesn’t win the presendency and
given the closeness of several state races, the youth vote might have
shifted the Electoral College in Kerry’s favor.)
I’d like to do more analysis of this exit poll data. There were certain
questions that I think are fascinating. For example, 43% of people
thought things are going well in Iraq, and 90% of them voted for Bush.
52% of people thought things are going badly, and 82% of them voted for
Kerry. Given that people perception of Iraq is directly effected by the
media reporting, it becomes fairly obviously the dramatic role that the
media plays in our elections. So there’s another issue for me to get
involved in – undoing the damage of media consolidation.
But for now, I’m going to try and sleep.