As state-by-state turnout data becomes available after the midterms, it’s clear that we remain in a period of high voter participation. Current estimates from the U.S. Elections Project suggest that turnout in the 2022 election was just a few percentage points shy of 2018, when turnout was the highest it had been in any midterm election in the past century.
Still, it’s important to remember that high turnout is not equally shared by all voters. Nonwhite turnout has been consistently lower than white turnout, and the racial turnout gap has widened in jurisdictions previously covered by the Voting Rights Act since the Supreme Court gutted the preclearance condition in 2013.
While most states have not yet provided their official 2022 voter file data with Election Day returns, Georgia has already published this data. Turnout in Georgia is especially worthy of examination, considering that its newly enacted Senate Bill 202 erected multiple barriers to voting in the state.
A Brennan Center analysis already revealed that the gap in turnout between white and Black voters in Georgia’s 2022 primaries was the highest it had been since at least 2014. While Georgia saw similar turnout numbers in November compared to the 2018 midterms, our new analysis shows that these racial turnout gaps persisted. In fact, although overall turnout didn’t change much from 2018, this high-level statistic obscures the fact that white turnout went up while nonwhite turnout went down, cancelling one another out, as the figure below makes clear. (See the bottom of this post for a note on data and methods.)…