The Truth (Damned Truth) of Election Statistics

Ignorance Isn’t Bliss

The final graph makes a few points, and we’ll take them one at a time.

First, compare the popular vote victory margin to the winning party — the scattered points at the top of the graph are Democratic wins, and the points at the bottom are Republican wins. It’s clear that there’s no relationship between the victory margin and the winning party — each party sometimes wins by a lot, sometimes by a little.

Next, look at a new piece of information, the eligible voter turnout, available since 1932. This is the percentage of all people of voting age that actually voted during each election, and it clearly fluctuates between only about 50% and 60%. Looking at voter turnout at the same time as the other pieces of information on this graph shows that there are no relationships among any of these trends. Increases in voter turnout don’t correspond to a greater passion for one candidate over another, nor do they correspond to any particular party winning. All these trends just float along on their own.

Of greatest importance, though, is the fact that, on average, only about 55% of people eligible to vote for a President actually bother to do so. So while only 20% of voters pick a President and only 10% are actually required for a win, only 11% of eligible voters choose the President, and only 5.5% are needed to win. In other words, of all the people of voting age in the U.S., at most about 1 of 10 — and as little as about 1 of 20 — makes any difference in the results.

The eligible voting population, then, breaks down as follows:

• About 45% of eligible voters don’t bother to participate in any Presidential elections.
• About 22% of eligible voters are committed Democrats.
• About 22% of eligible voters are committed Republicans.
• The remaining voters, about 11%, actually choose the President. They are flexible in their party preferences, and it takes only a bit more than half of them, about 5.5% of eligible voters, to pick the winner.

Cast aside your own personal politics for a moment, and think about what all of this means:

• Die-hard partisans have always balanced each other out. Any notion of either major party better representing “what America is about” is simply false.
• Further, these passionate people have no impact on Presidential elections — only a very small number of flexible voters picks the winner.
• That winner will have strong backing by only 22% of eligible voters, plus only fleeting and disloyal backing by another 5.5%-11% of eligible voters. Even under the grandest of electoral landslides, then, a President only really has explicit backing by around 30% of eligible voters.
• Whoever wins, the 22% of eligible voters who are in the losing party likely will be very upset through several years of undesirable policies, policies which affect the entire nation even though the winner has such little genuine support within the nation.
• Because the winner’s administration angers about as many people as they please, soon enough the other party will come into power to put contrary policies into place. This, of course, angers the people who were pleased under the previous administration, and so the other party will come into power again. The cycle then repeats.
• Despite whatever rhetoric any given candidate may give about how things will be different under his presidency (and let’s face it, it is always his presidency), nothing fundamental ever changes. The cyclical nature of the party wins and the lack of correlation between winning parties and any of the voting trends makes this clear. Most people are set in their ways, both major camps are about equal in size, and the remaining few are fickle, bouncing back and forth between the two opposing camps in a futile attempt at making something new happen when nothing new and lasting can possibly happen. It’s a stable system, and it isn’t going anywhere — literally.
• With so few people actually deciding the Presidency and such little overall support for whoever that is, it’s no wonder that nearly half of all eligible voters are chronically apathetic about voting. It’s an interesting coincidence that this apathetic population is about the same size as the total population of committed partisan voters. Also like the committed partisans, but clearly no coincidence, the apathetics must also split down the middle in their beliefs. If they didn’t, then some portion of them would likely become less apathetic and help their side win more elections. This, however, clearly doesn’t happen. The group remains apathetic, consciously or unconsciously acknowledging the lack of impact they can have on the system and so not bothering to participate.

Read on: A Vote for Change