Posted by
Always To The Right on Sunday, November 09, 2008 1:53:30 PM
Politico
reports that estimates of voter turnout continue to decline in this
year’s national election. At first, some predicted a turnout of 137
million. Now the estimates have declined to the point where the
percentage of eligible voters would be the same as in 2004, but only if
one accepts the idea that we’re still missing millions of votes from
the final total
I wrote about this on Wednesday, when MS-NBC
tried to argue that a 20-million vote deficit between the predictions
and the total counted to that point would get erased by the West Coast,
even though most of those votes had already been counted. Five days after the election,
we still have yet to surpass 123 million votes, and nationwide 99% of
all precincts have been counted. Only Washington and Oregon have any
significant number of precincts still out (8% and 3%). At worst, that
might represent 400,000 uncounted ballots at this stage.
Let’s add the 400,000 to the current vote totals. That would make
the vote total 123,176,039 votes cast for the presidential race — far
below the estimates given by so-called experts even today. With over
121 million votes cast in 2004 and over six million new voters
registered in the last four years, that’s a rather disappointing
conclusion to the longest presidential race in American history. That
would mean that only a third of new voters bothered to cast ballots, or
that a lot of previous voters withdrew from the process this time.
So what happened? Obama got six million more votes than John Kerry
and John McCain got slighly under five million less than George Bush.
Given the efforts at new registrations, it looks like Democrats turned
out well, while a significant chunk of Republicans stayed home.
Democratic GOTV efforts worked better than in 2004, but it didn’t
produce a landslide. Republican GOTV efforts had been in full swing,
but in the end, the ticket simply didn’t produce the excitement needed
to carry the GOP to victory.
This doesn’t delegitimize the victory that Barack Obama won on
Tuesday, but it does help demythologize it. Obama didn’t inspire any
boost in participation in the election process throughout the entire
population. The nominal gain seen will probably show as a slight
decline in percentage participation among elegible voters from 2004,
once the dust settles.