The United States has the dispiriting claim to having one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any developed nation. Part of the reason for that is that our archaic First-Past-The-Post electoral system discourages people in certain regions, be they counties, districts, or entire states, from showing up because thy think that their vote doesn’t matter. If you are a socialist in Wyoming, or a moral conservative in San Francisco, why indeed bother turning up to the polls? To what extent, if at all, however, are people using hard numbers when determining how much their vote is worth? Equally important, to what extent are campaign organizers and Get Out The Vote (GOTV) activists examining where their efforts to increase voter participation are best spent?
Christian Smith and I reviewed voter participation data from the most recent presidential election and we came up with a “voter turnout opportunity” score for each state (we would have liked to do it per county but weren’t able to find that data consolidated anywhere). A state’s turnout opportunity is calculated by taking the ratio of eligible non-voters to the margin of victory, and then scaling that value by the proportion of total electoral votes granted to that state. It is designed to capture how worthwhile it would be to focus energies on GOTV strategies in that state. A high turnout opportunity implies that one would only need to convince a relatively small number of those voters who stayed at home to come out and vote in order to flip the entire state and garner all it’s electoral votes.
$$TurnoutOpportunity = \frac{EligibleNonVoters}{MarginOfVictory} \times \frac{ElectoralVotes}{538}$$
Voter Opportunity By State
| STATE | VOTER TURNOUT OPPORTUNITY |
|---|---|
| MI | 7.290 |
| PA | 2.968 |
| FL | 2.460 |
| WI | 1.072 |
| NH | 0.809 |
| TX | 0.699 |
| AZ | 0.477 |
| MN | 0.424 |
| NC | 0.415 |
| GA | 0.400 |
| NV | 0.344 |
| CA | 0.259 |
| OH | 0.243 |
| VA | 0.233 |
| NY | 0.182 |
| CO | 0.145 |
| IL | 0.134 |
| NJ | 0.103 |
| NM | 0.093 |
| SC | 0.089 |
| IN | 0.083 |
| TN | 0.075 |
| MO | 0.060 |
| OR | 0.060 |
| IA | 0.055 |
| CT | 0.053 |
| ME | 0.053 |
| WA | 0.052 |
| LA | 0.050 |
| MS | 0.050 |
| UT | 0.047 |
| AL | 0.042 |
| KS | 0.040 |
| AR | 0.037 |
| MA | 0.037 |
| MD | 0.035 |
| KY | 0.035 |
| RI | 0.033 |
| OK | 0.033 |
| DE | 0.027 |
| AK | 0.024 |
| HI | 0.024 |
| WV | 0.022 |
| MT | 0.017 |
| ID | 0.016 |
| SD | 0.013 |
| VT | 0.012 |
| ND | 0.010 |
| NE | 0.009 |
| WY | 0.008 |
| DC | 0.004 |
The top five ‘turnout opportunity’ states are perhaps unsurprising: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire are among the known ‘swing states’ in US elections, so it makes sense that that is where a potential voter has the most electoral power. After that, however, we see some not so obvious candidates for targeted GOTV strategies. Texas comes in at number 6. A very interesting result from the 2016 election that got sort of drowned out amidst the Trump-mania was that Texas saw a rather substantial shift in favor of the Democrats. Although the state still went red, the margin of victory dropped from 16% to 9%. Moreover, with a turnout rate of 43.2%, Texas had the second lowest voter participation of all 50 states (only Hawaii is lower). For every 10 eligible voters who did not vote, Democrats needed only convince one of them to show up to vote Democrat, and Texas would have gone blue. Given the sheer size of the state, and the number of people who did not vote, Texas should be under serious consideration as a potential target for voter turnout opportunity in future campaigns. Arizona comes next, and it too exhibited a sizable shift towards being Democratic in 2016 – it’s margin dropped from 9% to 3.5% making it now a bona fide swing state. For comparison, the margins of victory in Ohio and North Carolina (both obsessed over by the media as ‘battleground’ states in the election) were larger than that of Arizona’s. Again, however, in part precisely because it is not considered a swing state, turnout in Arizona, at 48.9%, is substantially lower than the national average 54.7%. This makes it a much more attractive opportunity for someone looking to focus on voter turnout strategies. A similar story can be told about Georgia (margin of victory 5.1%, voter participation 52.6%).
Democrats tend to lose when voter turnout is low. Referring to certain states as ‘swing states’ just because of historical precedence ignores opportunities to win in other places, and compounds the injury by discouraging people in those non-swing states from showing up to vote at all. Looking at the data can inform us where and how to deploy certain campaign strategies and also help convince people who might have thought otherwise that their vote really is meaningfully important.