Over the past 15 years, the racial turnout gap in the United States has grown dramatically. A good deal of the widening gap — but by no means all of it — can be attributed to restrictive state voting policies, such as Georgia’s Senate Bill 202, following the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which hollowed out key protections against racially discriminatory voting rules. Perhaps just as important as formal laws and policies making voting more difficult are features in our democratic systems that leave many Americans of color underrepresented, which leads to disengagement from political participation. Campaign finance laws make it more difficult for low-income Americans to raise the money they need to run for office, the Electoral College reduces the value of most Americans’ presidential votes, and gerrymandered maps keep one party in power. To be sure, there were other reasons voters stayed home this year, like anger over inflation, that can’t be directly tied back to features of our democracy.
To fully explore these dynamics, we’ll need to wait until the national voter file becomes available next summer, along with large postelection surveys. But in Georgia, an important swing state, we already know exactly who cast a ballot in last month’s election, and the trends are somewhat concerning. (Georgia is the first state to release its voter history file, and the other states will follow.) We underscore that these results are preliminary, and it is not clear to what extent they might be true in other states. Nevertheless, understanding what happened in Georgia is important in its own right.
One takeaway is that the gap in turnout rates between white and Black voters in Georgia grew by 3 percentage points between 2020 and 2024 (for a discussion on how we calculated the number of eligible voters in Georgia in 2024, see the methodological note at the end of this piece). That’s roughly equal to how much the turnout gap grew between 2016 and 2020, but looking only at the change in the gap can be misleading. Between 2016 and 2020, turnout among both white and Black voters increased, but it increased more for white voters; that’s what drove up the turnout gap. This year, white turnout went up again in Georgia, but Black turnout declined by 0.6 points. That said, the total number of ballots cast by white and Black voters increased — from 3.16 million to 3.3 million for white voters and from 1.44 million to 1.52 million for Black voters — but the increase among Black voters did not keep up with population increases. All told, Black Georgians would have cast an additional 400,000 ballots if their turnout rate matched that of white Georgians. While we cannot know who these voters would have supported, this number is far larger than President-elect Trump’s winning margin of about 115,000 votes.