Change in voter turnout from 2008 to 2010

It's commonly reported that the turnout for US midterm elections differs from presidential elections. I've always assumed this to be the case without thinking about it in anything more than a general sense. Because any type of restraint on voter participation--whether it is a legal restriction like being incarcerated at voting time or just one of volition like bad weather or a hip black friend not being up for election, is good for those on the right--I figured numbers for whites, the affluent, and older folks would drop off less than they would for minorities, the poor, and the young.

Exit polling allows for actual quantitative comparisons to be made, and the following table does just that, looking at the change in the absolute number of voters from 2008 to 2010, and, more interestingly, the declines in percentage terms across various demographic categories:

	2008	2010	Abs chg	% chg
Male	55190120	40125074	(15065046)	(27.3)
Female	62235668	43468831	(18766837)	(30.2)
White	86895083	64367307	(22527776)	(25.9)
Black	15265352	9195330	(6070023)	(39.8)
Hispanic	9394063	6687512	(2706551)	(28.8)
Asian	2348516	1671878	(676638)	(28.8)
Other	3522774	1671878	(1850896)	(52.5)
18-24yo	11742579	5015634	(6726945)	(57.3)
25-29	9394063	5015634	(4378429)	(46.6)
30-39	21136642	11703147	(9433495)	(44.6)
40-49	24659415	17554720	(7104695)	(28.8)
50-64	31704963	26750050	(4954913)	(15.6)
65+	17613868	17554720	(59148)	(0.3)
<$30k	21136642	14210964	(6925678)	(32.8)
30-50k	22310900	15882842	(6428058)	(28.8)
50-75k	25833673	17554720	(8278953)	(32.0)
75-100k	17613868	12539086	(5074782)	(28.8)
100-200k	23485158	15882842	(7602316)	(32.4)
200k+	7045547	6687512	(358035)	(5.1)
Less than HS	4697032	2507817	(2189214)	(46.6)
HS grad	24659415	14210964	(10448452)	(42.4)
Some college	36401994	23406293	(12995701)	(35.7)
College grad	32879221	25078172	(7801049)	(23.7)
Postgraduate	19962384	17554720	(2407664)	(12.1)
Democrat	46970315	29257867	(17712448)	(37.7)
Republican	38750510	29257867	(9492643)	(24.5)
Independent	32879221	24242232	(8636988)	(26.3)
Liberal	25833673	16718781	(9114892)	(35.3)
Moderate	51667347	31765684	(19901663)	(38.5)
Conservative	39924768	35109440	(4815328)	(12.1)
Protestant	64584183	45976648	(18607536)	(28.8)
Catholic	30530705	19226598	(11304107)	(37.0)
Jewish	2348516	1671878	(676638)	(28.8)
Other	7045547	6687512	(358035)	(5.1)
None	14091095	10031269	(4059826)	(28.8)
Union member	24659415	14210964	(10448452)	(42.4)
No union member	92766373	69382941	(23383431)	(25.2)
Urban	34053479	25914111	(8139368)	(23.9)
Suburban	57538636	40961013	(16577623)	(28.8)
Rural	25833673	16718781	(9114892)	(35.3)
Gov't do more	59887152	31765684	(28121468)	(47.0)
Gov't does too much	50493089	46812587	(3680502)	(7.3)
Northeast	27007931	17554720	(9453211)	(35.0)
Midwest	29356447	20898476	(8457971)	(28.8)
South	39924768	25914111	(14010657)	(35.1)
West	21136642	19226598	(1910044)	(9.0)

Unsurprisingly, black numbers dropped the most. Blacks are the most 'racist' group in the US, and there weren't any high profile races across the country involving black candidates. Consequently, more than one in three blacks who voted in 2008 stayed home in 2010 (where the black option existed, though, blacks kept pace with whites--blacks constituted 25% of the electorate in South Carolina in 2008, and did so again in 2010). The "other" figure decreased from 3% to 2% from '08 to '10 according to exit polling data, but that's presumably more an artifact of reporting percentages in whole figures and probably shouldn't be taken seriously.

The drop among those aged 18-24 is the only category, save for the "other" racial classification, precipitous enough for the 2010 total to be less than half of what it was in 2010. Black ops is in, helping the hip black guy push through his political agenda is out. We'll vote for our favorite celebrity, but not for his Congressional allies. How boring! I advocate emulating Hertz and Avis and raising the voting age to 25.

Those of retirement age, in contrast, maintained virtually the exact same numbers as they did in '08. As age increases, the drop in participation steadily decreases. The recent elections were decided by adults.

Among those earning up to $200,000, the decreases are consistent. Only the rich deviated from the overall trend, coming out in relatively greater force than the rest of the population. Deficit spending driving the US economy off the cliff and all that matters to people with money.

The relationship between educational attainment and voting rate changes is, as in the case of age, clear and consistent. Nearly half of those who didn't graduate high school who voted in '08 did not vote in '10. That only applied to one-eighth of those with graduate degrees.

An obvious reason the Democratic party took a shellacking this time around is that liberals and Democrats were less motivated to vote than they were in '08. In contrast, self-described conservatives were out in close to the same numbers both elections.

Not only was the election decided by adults, the adults were far more skeptical of government involvement in society than the kiddos were a couple of years ago. In '08, 60 million voters shared the sentiment that "government should do more". This time, only 32 million voters did. And they were a minority--47 million said "government is doing too much".

I assume California, where several "key" elections took place, is the reason that the decrease in the west is smaller than it is throughout the rest of the country.

Tea party support by state

The following table shows net support (% of voters supporting - % of voters opposing) for the tea party movement by state among voters in the 2010 mid-term elections. Exit polling was only conducted extensively in states where the Senate and/or gubernatorial races were at least somewhat competitive:

State	Support	Oppose	Net
1) Texas	48	25	23
2) Arkansas	43	23	20
3) Indiana	46	27	19
4) West Virginia	40	24	16
4) Ohio	43	27	16
4) Arizona	46	30	16
7) Kentucky	43	28	15
8) South Carolina	43	29	14
9) Missouri	41	28	13
9) Louisiana	42	29	13
National	41	30	11
11) New Hampshire	41	32	9
12) Colorado	41	34	7
12) Florida	39	32	7
14) Wisconsin	37	32	5
15) Illinois	36	32	4
15) Pennsylvania	39	35	4
15) Iowa	36	32	4
18) Nevada	38	35	3
19) Oregon	36	36	0
20) California	34	35	(1)
20) New York	36	37	(1)
22) Washington	37	40	(3)
23) Connecticut	35	42	(7)
24) Delaware	35	45	(10)
25) Hawaii	26	37	(11)
26) Vermont	24	43	(19)

Nothing surprising here. The correlation between McCain's share of the vote in '08 and support for the tea party today is a nearly perfect .89. The phenomenon is a battle for the 'heart and soul' of the Republican party--there are very few leftists joining the cause.

What is remarkable is how the perceptions of the tea party compare with those of the two major parties. The following table shows net support for the tea party and each major political party, this time by net support for Democrats. Because the questions regarding the parties asks about favorability/unfavorability while the tea party question asks about support/opposition, it's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, but it's close. For whatever reason, exit pollsters in five states did not inquire about feelings towards the two parties, so those states are omitted:

State	Dem	Rep	TP
California	+6	(28)	(1)
Illinois	+6	(19)	+4
Delaware	+5	(20)	(10)
Washington	+4	(23)	(3)
Pennsylvania	(1)	(13)	+4
Oregon	(3)	(33)	+0
Wisconsin	(6)	(4)	+5
West Virginia	(7)	(4)	+16
National	(8)	(12)	+11
Colorado	(10)	(18)	+7
Florida	(11)	(8)	+7
Iowa	(11)	(2)	+4
Nevada	(11)	(12)	+3
Ohio	(11)	(12)	+16
Missouri	(15)	(5)	+13
Kentucky	(16)	+2	+15
Arkansas	(17)	+8	+20
Indiana	(18)	+5	+19
New Hampshire	(18)	(1)	+9
South Carolina	(19)	+9	+14
Texas	(19)	+5	+23
Arizona	(23)	+1	+16

In no state does the GOP receive greater support than the tea party. I've resigned myself to the idea that I will be voting without exception for hopeless third party presidential candidates for my entire life, but if ever the ground seems fertile enough for a perennial third party to take root, now is that time.

Even in some competitive blue states like Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Wisconsin, the tea party does better than Democrats do. Even in solidly Democratic states like California and Illinois, feelings towards the tea party are decidedly mixed. Christine O'Donnell, like Sarah Palin, appears to have a knack for really grating some people. Consequently, opposition to the tea party is especially high in Delaware relative to its political profile.

We are doomed (economically), and other 2010 mid-term election observations

++Addition++Patrick Cleburne notes that I disagree with the idea that immigration is a winning issue for the GOP. That's a product of poor communication on my part, not my actual sentiments. I'm just speculating that going as far as Angle did may have been politically counterproductive. I suspect (and the exit polling data appears to support me) that people who are seriously concerned with immigration will seek out politicians' stances on it, so making it a campaign centerpiece is unnecessary and runs the risk of opening one up to all the usual point-and-sputter charges of racism, bigotry, hate, etc.

---

California's Proposition 19 was shot down at nearly identical rates by race. Like American Idol and Monday Night Football, the attempt to legalize marijuana use among those old enough to drink is something people of every color can appreciate, or in this case, object to:

Race	Yes	No
White (60%)	46%	54%
Black (10%)	47%	53%
Hispanic (22%)	45%	55%
Asian (4%)	39%	61%
Other (3%)	48%	52%

The partisan differences are far more distinct, however:

Party	Yes	No
Democrat	56%	44%
Republican	30%	70%
Independent	47%	53%

Without taking this into consideration, we'd miss the fact that non-white Democrats fell in between independent whites and Republican whites in their levels of opposition to Prop 19. Support only came from white Democrats which, even in solidly blue California, wasn't enough to get it passed. There's a take-home message or two here for SWPLs.

Arizona and Colorado each had propositions (actually an amendment to the state constitution in the case of the latter) on healthcare up for voter consideration that were similarly designed to challenge the Obama plan. As expected, in both states conservatives and Republicans were the most supportive of the propositions, liberals and Democrats the least so, with moderates and independents in between.

Far more remarkable (and in my opinion, encouraging) was how the age trend ran in the opposite direction it so consistently runs on other issues largely defined by party affiliation. Young people were most supportive of the propositions and, by extension, are the least supportive of Obamacare. In Arizona:

Age	Yes	No
18-29 (10%)	60%	40%
30-44 (21%)	55%	45%
45-64 (42%)	57%	43%
65+ (28%)	50%	50%

In Colorado, the 18-29 age range was too small to reliably report a breakdown for, but the trend is similar:

Age	Yes	No
18-29 (9%)	N/A	N/A
30-44 (22%)	48%	52%
45-64 (47%)	48%	52%
65+ (21%)	43%	57%

Young adults appear to understand that a socialized healthcare system is one in which they will be paying for benefits their elders will enjoy without getting anything in return. With the inversion of the age pyramid that is taking place across the Western world, the young are already going to be dealing with increasing demands on their resources from social security and other old age entitlements that are not tied directly to healthcare. They are understandably reluctant to take on the burdens Obamacare will inevitably place on them.

I wonder if supporters of the Arizona and Colorado propositions were aware of how the age element played into the results. This was the first general election in which such propositions directly challenging Obamacare could be put to the voting public, so waiting until 2012 would've meant passing up the earliest opportunity. But it also would've meant a higher percentage of the electorate would've been in the 18-29 year old range. In Arizona, it didn't matter--Prop 106 passed. In Colorado, however, amendment 63 narrowly went down to defeat.

Moving to the congressional elections, following President Obama's victory in the 2008 election, Half Sigma decried the GOP becoming a party of poor, dumb whites, citing Obama's victory among the highest income voters. Two years later, the clarion call is sounding a bit silly. One of the good (or convenient, anyway) things about stagnating per capita wealth in the US over the last decade is that like comparisons among voters by income range can be made across election cycles. The following table shows the percentage of voters who voted for the Democrat in their district's House race ('06 and '10) and who voted for Obama ('08):

Income	2006	2008	2010
$30k-	63%	64%	56%
$30k-$50k	56%	55%	51%
$50k-$75k	50%	48%	46%
$75k-$100k	52%	51%	42%
$100k-$200k	47%	48%	42%
$200k+	45%	52%	35%

More than half of all voters earning more than $200,000 a year supported Obama. A couple of years later, only one-third of high income earners voted Democrat. The country's most affluent swung farther back to the right--a full 17 points--than any other income group--where swings ranged from 2 to 9 points--did between '08 and '10. Either Obama is a uniquely SWPL candidate, or a lot of people didn't know who they were voting for. Everywhere exit polling was conducted and reported at the state level showed that income and voting Republican correlated positively with two exceptions; the uber SWPL state of Oregon, where the trend mostly ran in the opposite direction, and Delaware, where income wasn't much of a factor.

Contingent upon the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, I suspect the latter will prove to be the case, with many high income earners abandoning Obama in his reelection bid. On the brighter side for the left, however, post-graduates who don't make jack shit are still reliably Democratic!

Kudos to the media establishment for preferring the term "independent" to "moderate" when referring to swing voters. Among self-described moderates, Republicans gained a relatively paltry 6 points between '08 and '10 (and still lost them as a group, 42%-55%). Among self-described independents, though, the swing was more than twice that, at 13 points, for a 56%-38% victory. Parenthetically, moderate is a potential answer to the question on political ideology, while independent is a potential response to the question on party identification.

Despite disingenuous admonitions to Republicans about becoming the "party of no" from leftist commentators on NPR and NBC, 56% of the electorate asserted that the government needs to hear a lot more noes than it has been hearing lately ("government is doing too much"). Only 38% said the "government should do more".

Ideally, rather than asking specifically about illegal immigration, exit polls would query voters on immigration in general. The illegal adjective has negative connotations for most people, and consequently when asked to choose the most important issue among a list of several, those who identify illegal immigration as the most pressing are probably more restrictionist than would be the case if the issue in question was regarding immigration policy in general. Or more precisely, those who might choose immigration as their most important issue instead of say, healthcare, still choose healthcare if the immigration choice is limited to one concerning only illegal immigration.

That said, there are plenty of people out there who care about illegal immigration and want to make it easier for those who are illegal to become legal residents, in some cases by merely being present in the US and wanting to live here. And among those who care about illegal immigration the most, Republicans won big, 69%-26%. The pragmatic lesson here for politicians is that (in the general election) restrictionism wins, but it doesn't need to be a centerpiece of their campaigns.

Far from being an unfortunate curmudgeonly exception to the ebullient optimism of the American people, a plurality of voters basically agree with the Derb that we are doomed:

Life for the next generation will be...
Better	32%
Worse	38%
About the same	26%

For those hoping to see pessimism reclaimed, consider an even greater reason to be optimistic! In three seemingly random states that held a Senate and/or gubernatorial election--Colorado, Florida, and Ohio--exit pollsters asked voters whether the economy was in a normal downturn or in long-term decline:

US economy is in...	Colorado	Florida	Ohio
Normal downturn	22%	23%	22%
Long-term decline	72%	73%	77%

Whether you're from the mountain west, the Ohio valley, or the sunshine state, sing it from the rooftops: We are doomed!

Less happily, most Republicans continue to be sunny on the war in Afghanistan. A little over a month ago, Pat Buchanan wrote a column presaging a splitting of the blanket by the tea party wing and war wing of the new GOP. Looks like the latter has the advantage of strength in numbers:

War in Afghanistan	Approve (40%)	Disapprove (54%)
Democrat	23%	77%
Republican	60%	40%

Those opposed to the war are a minority (within the GOP; it's the majority opinion more generally), but at least they are now a substantial one.

In a series of email exchanges I had with the late Richard Nadler, the open borders conservative pointed to John McCain's strong performance among Hispanics in his '04 Senate reelection campaign, in which he won 70% of their votes. But he also won 77% of the white vote, illustrating Steve Sailer's observation that Hispanics tend to vote as whites do, shifted several points to the left.

Six years later, McCain won reelection again. His good fortune was sealed in the primary when he defeated JD Hayworth, but apparently his triumph there did not come without cost. After a decade of being the GOP establishment's front man on amnesty, one nebulous ad about completing "the danged fence" and his Hispanic support vanished* (so goes the media narrative, anyhow). He lost 40%-57% among Hispanics to Rodney Glassman, whose campaign stance on immigration was almost indistinguishable from McCain's.

Yet McCain still sailed to an easy victory because he won the far more important white vote by a wide margin, 64%-29%. It's still one person, one vote after all!

Despite the presumption many have of Christine O'Donnell as a Christian kook, she won among whites in Delaware, 51%-45%. She lost her Senate bid because more than one-fifth of the state's electorate is black, and blacks voted against her 93%-6%, nearly the same rate that blacks voted for Obama in the '08 presidential election. C'mon, don't act surprised. You know how black guys feel about white girls who won't put out!

In most states with large Hispanic populations and a Senate election taking place, exit pollsters asked voters an absurdly dichotomous question about whether most illegal immigrants should be "offered legal status" or "deported". Strangely enough, the question was left out in Florida! Could it be that the majority of those favoring deportation voted for a Hispanic guy and against a white guy? That doesn't fit the narrative and simply must be kept from the public at all costs!

Along with their opposition to federal healthcare mandates, Kentucky offers another reason to find joy in the phrase "the children are our future". Rand Paul pulled off a nearly impossible feat for a Republican in a tight statewide election--he won the 18-24 year old vote, 52%-47%. While I'm a bit wary of how he'll vote on immigration legislation, he embodies my sentiments more than any of the other 99 Senators he'll be sharing the chamber with next year.

Initial exit polling data was reported to show that Sharron Angle had taken a black-like shellacking among Hispanics in Nevada's Senate election. As it turns out, her performance among Hispanics (30%-68%) was in line with Republicans nationwide (34%-64%). It's hardly surprising that given eligibility for affirmative action benefits, low levels of educational attainment, low incomes, high rates of poverty, and high rates of welfare usage, Hispanics are going to find a home in the Democratic party. Very few currently backing Democrats would otherwise be inclined to vote Republican if only the GOP would listen to Bryan Caplan.

Finally, a conundrum from Washington. Patty Murray, the Democrat, won among those aged 45 and older, 54%-46%, but Dino Rossi, the Republican, won among those aged 18-44 by an identical 54%-46%. Hey, I only claimed that Rand Paul's feat was nearly impossible.

* His Arizonan support, anyway. McCain was never able to persuade many Hispanics to back him in '08, even though as I wrote a month before the election, he could not have asked for a more favorable Democratic opponent to be running against as far as garnering the Hispanic vote was concerned:

We have the highest-profile open borders member of the GOP's national leadership, who teamed up with Ted Kennedy in an amnesty attempt that united the public in opposition and who virtually barred restrictionists from the Republican National Convention, running against Obama, who lost the Hispanic vote 64%-36% [to Hillary Clinton, during the Democratic primaries], a margin less favorable than Bush enjoyed among Hispanics in '04. Could you [, Richard Nadler,] ask for a better setup? Yet McCain is getting massacred by Obama among Hispanics. The polls show him losing the Hispanic vote 59%-29%, an Obama advantage that has held steady for several months.