Tag Archives: voter turnout

Mamdani’s electoral coalition in the primary (a revision)

primaries, voter registration,

Justin popping back in. Today, the NYT issued a correction to its story on Mamdani’s impact on the NYC primary electorate, and what I described yesterday as a “staggering” departure from the norm:

A correction was made on June 30, 2025: An earlier version of the chart in this article showing voters by age incorrectly identified the age group with the largest turnout. It was voters aged 30 to 34, not those aged 18 to 24.

Here’s the original chart:

And here’s the update:

To be clear, that turnout by younger voters (both 18-24 and 25-29 year-olds) is still eye-popping, both as a primary-over-primary increase and as an absolute. The 18-24 turnout is just a little less “staggering” than it looked yesterday.

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More evidence of the Trump mobilization of lower-frequency voters

election administration, political parties, The Voting Wars

The NYT headline is “If Everyone Had Voted, Harris Still Would Have Lost.” 

Which, of course, is impossible to know, unless you assume that demographics is inevitably destiny. 

But the broader point of the outcome of this new Pew study is one a few of us have been noting for a while: Trump had/has significant appeal among a set of voters less likely to vote frequently (including a larger component of racial and ethnic minorities than his previous runs).  That likely means that efforts to increase turnout may favor Republicans, at least in some areas. 

And because less frequent voters are hardest hit by new barriers, I’ve wondered quite a bit whether we’ll start to see the fact of Trump’s appeal to less frequent voters reflected in shifting incentives for election administration, fighting quite a bit of what seems to be received conventional wisdom.

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“Miami approves delay of election to 2026, setting up legal battle with state”

election administration, ,

Florida Politics reports on the Miami commissioners’ vote — against stern advice from the Florida Attorney General — to postpone city elections from 2025 to 2026.  The move moves the elections to a higher-turnout occasion, but also prolongs existing officers’ terms … and may not comport with the city charter, which apparently requires voter approval for such a change.

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“High Turnover with Low Accountability: Local School Board Elections in 16 States”

voting, ,

An intriguing new paper by Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu, and Zachary Peskowitz:

We analyze the most comprehensive dataset on U.S. school board elections. We find that nearly half of races go uncontested and that incumbents are reelected more than 80 percent of the time when they run. Because many incumbents retire instead of running for another term, however, turnover is high (with 53 percent of incumbents replaced in a typical election cycle). School board turnover is also only weakly related to student learning rates. These dynamics–high turnover disconnected from school performance challenges–occur across both urban and non-urban districts, regardless of student demographics and local media environments. Together, these results suggest that local democracy produces high leadership churn and minimal incentives to improve student learning, two findings that can inform debates regarding the benefits and costs of local democratic governance.

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“N.Y.C. Mayoral Primary May Hinge on Early Voters as Heat Wave Looms”

absentee ballots, election administration, primaries, ,

Yet another reminder that early and mail voting options help mitigate the degree to which a system of voting only on one day is subject to anomalies on that day that don’t really have anything to do with accurately conveying the desires of the eligible electorate.  Here, it’s a forecast for 100-degree heat for Tuesday’s primary in NYC.

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“Why On-And-Off Voters Who Backed Trump May Be GOP’s Midterm Silver Bullet”

election administration, The Voting Wars

The Daily Caller calls out low-propensity Republican voters. 

Given that restrictions on access to the ballot generally hit low-propensity voters harder, I’ve been wondering for a while whether the political incentives on election administration issues might be changing.  (And that’s probably a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction question.)

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“School Choice and Household Participation in School District Politics”

voting,

A fascinating new Annenberg Institute paper from three MSU researchers on the connection between school choice and voter turnout in local bond elections.  Theoretically, I can understand why sending your kid to a different school might change incentives to vote for or against a local bond, but it’s a more interesting question why it might change the incentive to vote at all.

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“The Disparate and Durable Effects of Mail Voting Restrictions: Evidence from Texas”

absentee ballots, election administration, The Voting Wars, voter registration

More from Texas.  This is interesting research on 2021’s SB1, which (among other elements) required voters casting mail ballots to provide either their driver’s license or state ID number or their Social Security digits, both on mail ballot applications and then again under the flap of a mail ballot envelope itself – and required the information to match the voters on the registration rolls.

The study tracked voters whose applications or ballots were rejected because of this requirement in the 2022 primary election.  But the fascinating part for me is the longitudinal analysis using individual-level data, using difference-in-differences stats to try to assess the impact of the rejection on participating in other elections – the 2022 general election and the 2024 primaries.  Interesting stuff.

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Race and Representation in the Battleground Counties

voting, , , ,

Voter turnout nationally during the 2020 Presidential Election was 66%—the highest since 1900. But a recent analysis from The Union of Concerned Scientists of voter turnout by precinct in 11 battleground counties found clear racial disparities, driven in part by differences in election resources & voter communication in individual precincts & counties. The findings are presented through an interactive map and also available in more fun forms on twitter and Instagram. The full report, Race and Representation in Battleground Counties: Racial Disparities in Voter Turnout and Ballot Rejections in the 2020 Election, is worth the read.

As summarized by the authors:

“The results show that 2020 turnout was highest in majority-White precincts and lowest in majority-Black and majority-Hispanic precincts.”

[At the same time,] “Many majority-Black precincts turned out at rates higher than the average majority-White precinct in 2020. Similarly, turnout rates in some majority-Hispanic precincts were close to the average turnout in majority-White precincts. ”

Poverty explains much of the difference, but the authors conclude that:

“While inequalities in voter turnout are more persistent and rooted in deeper social inequities, democratic capacity can be cultivated even in hostile conditions. Local civic organizations can also benefit from greater data transparency and data sharing in partnership with local election administrators.”

With a focus on large and diverse communities within electorally pivotal states, the report looks at:

  • Maricopa County, AZ 
  • Fulton County, GA 
  • Wayne County, MI 
  • Columbus, Durham, and Mecklenburg Counties, NC 
  • Cuyahoga and Lorain Counties, OH 
  • Allegheny and Philadelphia Counties, PA 
  • Milwaukee County, WI 
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Ground Game 2024

voter initiatives, voter registration,

Harris just picked up a big endorsement. The AP reports that UNITE HERE has endorsed Harris, promising “to have its members knock on more than 3.3 million doors for Harris in swing states that include Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina.” The union was the engine behind Harry Reid’s success in turning Nevada Blue.

Trump, meanwhile, having put an end to the RNC’s planned ground game strategy, is planning to use three super PACs (America First Works, America PAC, and Turning Point Action) to orchestrate his voter turnout efforts. This strategy was made possible after the FEC issued new guidance that allows campaigns and outside groups to coordinate and share information related to turnout. The Trump campaign is also maintaining its reliance on committed volunteers (using a model similar to Obama’s).

The FEC’s deregulatory choice is something I have long supported. Spending money on voter turnout is what we should be doing. The RNC’s decision to retreat from a plan that involved opening 12 offices and hiring 88 staff members, on the other hand, seems a step in the wrong direction–although it appears only ever to have been a short-term presidential cycle plan (also shortsighted).

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“With voting under attack, Arizona schools don’t want to be polling locations”

Uncategorized

This Washington Post article should be read in light of all we know about the social nature of voting and the importance of fun and festivity to turnout (think Souls to the Polls) and the data on how important it is to instill in kids familiarity with their civic duties long before they can vote.

“In the eight years since Donald Trump was first on the ballot, hundreds of schools throughout this fiercely contested battleground county are no longer willing to assume the risks associated with holding elections. In 2016, 37 percent of county polling locations were schools, according to a Washington Post analysis of data obtained through a public records request. So far this year, it’s 14 percent.

Heightened school safety protocols and sustained attacks on voting systems and the people who run them — largely by Trump and his supporters — have prompted school leaders across America in both red and blue states to close their doors to the democratic process, according to interviews with nearly 20 school district leaders, county officials, school safety officials and election experts.”

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Voters “get talked to, but not talked with.”

political parties, redistricting, ,

The newest episode of Our Body Politic also has an excellent interview with Los Angeles City Council Member Nithya Raman about politics in Los Angeles. Raman describes, among other things, a kind of retail, door-to-door politics that involves both listening to and developing renters as a political constituency–the kind of politics Didi Kuo and I have argued is key to better parties.

“On renters issues in a city where housing and security is an important issue, I was the first candidate who spoke to renters.”

The interview points to the value of bringing local elections onto the national election cycle: Voter turnout in the district jumped from 24,000 to 130,000 the year Raman ran, which was also the first year city council elections aligned with national elections. Still, the bottom line of the interview is that Los Angeles’ council districts are too large for the kind of politics that would matter to voters: 260,000 constituents per district makes it difficult for even a committed official to be present in ‘every single neighborhood” they represent. (The interview starts around 30 minutes into the podcast.)

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