10.5: Voter Behavior

Ultimately, the key to winning any elected office in the United States, from small-town city council all the way up to the presidency, is voter support. Every election cycle, millions of dollars are spent trying to predict and influence whether and how Americans will vote in elections. As with public opinion, it may be impossible to fully explain any individual American’s voting behavior, but it is possible to identify overall trends in voter participation and choice that manifest more or less nationwide and tend to persist from one election to the next.

Voter participation, or turnout, varies across demographic groups. Older, richer, and more educated Americans are likelier to vote than their younger, poorer, and less educated counterparts. Whites vote more often than members of other racial and ethnic groups. Women, who were unable to vote in most states prior to the Nineteenth Amendment, now vote at a higher rate than men.

turnout: The percentage of people who vote in an election.

Electoral rules and campaign contexts also influence turnout. Strict voter registration and voter ID laws make voting more difficult, whereas mail-in and no-excuse absentee ballots make voting easier. General elections tend to draw higher turnout than primaries. More Americans vote in presidential elections than in midterm elections held halfway between presidential ones, as shown in Figure 10.2 below. Even fewer vote in “off-year” elections, when typically only a handful of state and local races are on the ballot.

Figure 10.2: Turnout among eligible voters, 1789-2022 (Source: United States Elections Project)

The strongest predictor of how Americans will vote is partisanship. The two major parties in the United States — the Democratic Party and the Republican Party — count on the backing of distinct voting blocs. Democrats tend to earn more support than Republicans do from young voters, poor voters, racial and ethnic minorities, union members, and residents of the East and West coasts. Republicans draw more strength than Democrats do from old voters, rich voters, whites, religious conservatives, and residents of the South and Midwest. None of these voting blocs is monolithic: there are young Republicans and old Democrats, black Republicans and white Democrats. Nor are party coalitions permanent over time: realignments occasionally occur when existing blocs shift their loyalties or new blocs emerge. Still, these patterns are informative and reliable enough to help both average Americans and political practitioners understand and anticipate electoral outcomes.

Voters do not decide whether and how to vote in a vacuum. Candidates, parties, and other organizations actively campaign with the goal of shaping voter behavior. Broadly speaking, campaigns engage in two categories of politicking to influence voter choice and participation. Persuasion is the act of encouraging citizens to support a particular candidate, party, or issue position, and can include both positive campaigning (such as extolling the qualities and virtues of a candidate) and negative campaigning (such as criticizing an opponent for extreme views or scandalous behavior). Mobilization is the act of encouraging citizens to turn out to vote, which often entails voter registration drives or even physically transporting voters (with their permission) to polling stations. The most effective campaigns are the ones which use these tools efficiently, focusing their persuasion efforts on the voters who are most swayable to their side and their mobilization efforts on citizens who already favor them but need encouragement to actually go out and vote.