For Every 10 U.S. Adults, Six Vote and Four Don’t. What Separates Them?
By ALICIA PARLAPIANO and ADAM PEARCE SEPT. 13, 2016
The richer, older and more educated you are, the more likely you are to vote.
While young people, poor people and Hispanics are often singled out for low voting rates, there are millions of nonvoters in every demographic group. In fact, the majority of people who didn’t vote in the 2012 presidential election were white, middle-income and middle-aged. But what distinguishes voters from nonvoters can be only partly explained by demographics. Experts say individuals tend to be motivated by a combination of their priorities, their group culture, how competitive their state is, and how easy or hard it is to vote.
At the individual level, education and income are still two of the strongest predictors of whether someone will turn out at the polls. “Most of the differences between people who vote and those who don’t vote can be accounted for by motivational reasons — levels of political interest and engagement,” said Benjamin Highton, a professor of political science at the University of California, Davis. “And levels of political interest and engagement are strongly correlated with education and income.”
Among voters with little education, African-Americans are 1.7 times more likely to vote than whites.
While education increases political knowledge and engagement, the factors that drive an individual to pursue education may be the same ones that lead to participation in politics. Age is also strongly correlated to voting. One explanation is that as people get older, they tend to own homes, pay more taxes and have less residential mobility, increasing their stakes in the political system. Voting rates begin to fall when people reach their late 70s, as health and mobility obstacles make it harder to get to the polls.
There are also group dynamics that influence voting rates across racial and ethnic lines. Even when statistics are adjusted for income and education, there are large gaps among rates for whites, blacks and Hispanics in the United States. Black voters, particularly women, have the highest turnout rates over all. The turnout gap with whites is most pronounced at lower levels of income and education.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/13/us/politics/what-separates-voters-and-nonvoters.html
