Voter demographics, access, and turnout

[00:00:28]

RICK WEISS: Hello, everyone, and welcome to SciLine’s Media Briefing on voter demographics, access, and turnout. This is meant to be a timely briefing for you. It’s going to remind you that who wins in an election is about more than just which candidate is most favored. But it’s a lot about who chooses to vote and who gets to vote. And so as you hear about political strategies out there or even legislative activities in some states that are going on that seem to be geared towards influencing who will be most likely or most able to vote, we’re here to help you understand what the research actually says about the impacts of these kinds of policies and the context around all that work.

I’m SciLine’s director, Rick Weiss. And for those of you not familiar with us, SciLine is a philanthropically funded, editorially independent, and entirely free service for journalists and scientists. We’re based at the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science. Our mission is simply to make it as easy as possible for you as reporters to include scientific data, scientific expertise, and context in your news stories, whether those stories are about a science topic or are about, as in this case, something else going on in your community, in the nation, where some scientific research results can help add some rigor and some research-based context to your story. Among other things, we offer a free expert matching service. So, you can come to us, click on the little blue button, I Need an Expert at SciLine.org, and we will help you find a researcher or some kind of an academic scientist or someone else with the right expertise to help you with the story you’re working on, pretty much no matter what the topic of that story is.

Jumping to some logistics here, we’re going to have two speakers today who are going to make short presentations of less than 10 minutes each. And then we will jump to the live Q&A to ask a question either during their presentations or after. Just go down to that Q&A icon at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Tell us your name, your news outlet, and your question. And if you want it directed to one of the two folks or the other, let us know that as well. A full video of this briefing should be up on our website by the end of the day today, and typically, a transcript with timestamps will be available a day or two later than that. Let us know if you have any issues by messaging us in the Q&A icon at the bottom again. I’m not going to take the time to do full introductions of our two speakers today.

I want to jump right into it. But I will tell you that we will hear first from Dr. Lisa Bryant, professor and chair of the department of political science at California State University, Fresno. And she’s going to get us up to speed on recent trends in voter—sorry—voter turnout along factors like race, age, gender, socioeconomic status. And second, we’re going to hear from Dr. John Holbein, associate professor of public policy, politics, and education at University of Virginia, who will focus on factors that either drive voter turnout or, in some cases, may deter voter turnout and what the research says about who is most affected basically by these kinds of policies. Okay. Let’s get started. And over to you, Dr. Lisa Bryant.

[00:03:54]

LISA BRYANT: Great. Thank you for having me. I am not able to share my screen now. Okay. Sorry. The option for PowerPoint went away. So, I’ll just put my PowerPoint on my screen and then share it that way. Can you see that?

[00:04:20]

RICK WEISS: That’s beautiful.

[00:04:21]

LISA BRYANT: Okay, great. Sorry. OK. So, I’m going to talk today about voter demographics and who is turning out to vote in elections. And then Dr. Holbein will take it from there. So, thank you for having me today. I really appreciate being here and getting to reach out to journalists. I think that there should be more collaboration between political science and journalists while you’re in journalism school. So, that’s a dream of mine. And I try to make it happen at my university. But first, I’m going to start by talking about turnout by election type. And election turnout is pretty inconsistent depending on what kind of election we’re talking about.

So, presidential elections always have the highest turnout. And we can see that it’s about a 10 percent gap. I’m going to talk you through this graph really quickly because all of my graphs used today are set up in the same way. Where along the x-axis, I have the year of the election. And along the y axis, I have either the percent or proportion turnout by the group I’m talking about. So, you can see this graph goes way back to 1789. And we saw a big spike in the 1800s. But since, basically, for the last hundred-plus years, we’ve seen fairly consistent higher turnout in presidential elections. And there are several reasons for that, some of which I’m sure Dr. Holbein will talk about. But the cost of information or learning about candidates is much lower in presidential elections. There’s just information in your face all the time. And so it’s sort of easier to figure out who the candidates are, what their platforms are, what the issues are. And that’s a little bit harder in midterm elections. And so we tend to see a lot more inconsistent voters or non-habitual voters who come in and out of participation during presidential election years. Whereas midterm election years, we tend to see strong partisans, habitual voters, we call them, are very consistent voters that you can sort of rely on. So, looking at some of our most consistent turnout patterns, education, going back to the earliest research in political science, seminal piece on the American voter, education has always been a really good predictor of turnout. Similar to the last graph I showed, you can see that these spikes are midterm and presidential years. So, the high spikes are the presidential elections, and the low points are midterm. So, even among our most educated, most consistent, reliable voters, we see a variation across different election types. But you can see, in 2020, we had a really big spike across all different levels of education.

There was a lot of enthusiasm around the 2020 election on both sides of the aisle for various reasons. But you can see that consistently, those with a postgraduate degree, so that’s both business and academic postgraduate degrees, tend to turn out in very high rates. In 2020 was, about 90 percent of people with a postgraduate degree who were eligible to vote turned out. I should—I should mention that. So, all of my graphs are using the current population survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. But they are weighted to represent a voting eligible population. And what that means is not everybody in the United States is eligible to vote. You have to be a citizen. You have to be registered. Some people don’t have access to the franchise because they may have felony convictions. And so there’s various reasons that it’s preferable to use what we call the voting-eligible population as compared to what we call the voting-age population, which is if you just looked at the census data and said, what percentage of people over 18 vote? These numbers would be deflated. They would look much lower because it includes people who are not eligible. So, I think that’s one thing I forgot to mention in the first slide that I wanted to draw attention to, that these are numbers of those who are eligible. So, you can see that there is a big gap between people who have some college and a college degree and then those who only have a high school degree. And then that gap is pretty large also consistently across election years between those who have high school and less than high school. So, the lower level of education, the less likely one is to participate.

Another fairly consistent predictor of turnout is age. And you can see that going back to 1986, across all elections, we see that older voters, those 45 and older, are much more likely to turn out upwards of 60 or 70 percent compared to younger voters, those in their teens, 20s, and 30s, and especially those 18- to 29-year-old voters. They’re the least likely to turn out. We can talk in Q&A maybe about why that is or maybe Dr. Holbein will talk about that. But there’s some—there’s some good research on why younger voters don’t turn out. And that said, you can see in our last couple of elections, 2016, 2020, the numbers who turnout across all age categories went up again. And that gap in 2020 became a little bit smaller for younger voters.

So, there was some enthusiasm for young people to turn out. There might be enthusiasm again this year. I’ve seen some good—NBC Decision Desk just had a really good poll out recently that showed younger voters were a little enthusiastic about Tim Walz. And we’ll see if that—vice presidents usually don’t matter that much. But, hey, who knows? It could happen this year. Turning to gender again, since 1980—around 1976, 1978 is when women started voting in parity with men. And now we see that since the 1980s, women have been consistently voting at a rate slightly higher than men. So, it changes per election from anywhere between 2 to 4 percent higher turnout among women than men. And this is consistent, again, across almost all racial and ethnic groups. And you can see there’s some variation by election on how big that gap is. But it’s still a pretty persistent result that we see in the political science data.

And then this is where I’ll talk about intersectionality for a second. When we look at turnout by race and ethnicity, again, we see some fluctuation going on around primarily candidate-driven elections. So, you can see that white voters, for the most part, turn out at the highest rate. But in 2008 and 2012, you can see that Black voters voted at higher rates than white voters. And that’s an Obama effect. And so it’ll be interesting to see if that replicates this year with Harris being on the ballot. There’s also an interesting, what we call, intersectional finding where if we look at gender and race, in 2008 and 2012, Black women as a proportion were the highest turnout of any demographic group in those elections and then followed by white women, white men, and then Black men. And you can see that Black voters and white voters, they’re pretty close in turnout. And there was a little bit of a gap in 2016 and 2020. Some discussions about if candidates appealed to Black voters as much in those years. So, again, we’ll have to watch what happens this year, given that we have a multiracial candidate on the ballot for the first time, which could influence voter turnout. Looking at the bottom two lines, the small dash line is non-Hispanic groups who identify as non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Black, or Hispanic. So, it could be Asian Americans. It also includes Native Americans, Pacific Islanders. And so that has had some slightly higher turnout than Hispanic voters. Although, it’s interesting if we disaggregate that, we see that Asian American voters tend to vote in the lowest turnout. And Asian American women, in particular, are the only female group or group of women that votes at a lower rate than men. And so, again, with Kamala Harris being a mixed-race candidate and being an Indian American, it’ll be interesting to see if that mobilizes Asian American women this year and if we see an uptick in turnout among Asian American women.

And lastly, I want to talk about an increasingly important divide that we research, but we haven’t been researching as much, maybe, as we should. And it’s, I think, gaining in attention. And that is the urban-rural divide because we really see sorting to a degree that we have not seen in the past in the United States, where Democrats and liberals or those leaning to the left are congregating in cities. And then, in rural areas, we see those areas going Republican or red or more conservative. And you can see I have two states here. One is Pennsylvania, which is a swing state, which is leaning slightly Democrat the last time I looked a couple of days ago. And then we have Ohio, which is now a consistently red state or voting Republican state majority. And you can see that in both of these areas, that the spikes that are—the height of the spike is the number of voters in a precinct. The degree of blue, dark blue, is very Democrat-leaning precinct. And dark red is very Republican-leaning precinct in terms of vote share that they got. And so you can see those dark blue tall spikes in the cities. But then almost all of the rural outlying area are red areas. And so we’re really seeing an ideological and partisan concentration of voters in urban areas.

So, I guess my takeaway message at this point is that voting, we know about some persistent patterns, but we also know that there’s some inconsistent patterns. And we don’t exactly know what the inconsistencies will be this time. They can change. They change with each election. They can be candidate driven. They can be issue driven. And so when you’re looking at polls and you’re looking at predictions of who’s going to win and who’s going to turn out, just know that this is sort of a moving target. And the polls are really good. But the predictions are based off of past behavior, and things don’t always replicate. So, that’s my—I will turn it over to Dr. Holbein.

[00:14:37]

RICK WEISS: Great. Thank you, Dr. Bryant. Fantastic foundational overview and great warning at the end that past performance doesn’t predict future activities. So, we still have some surprises ahead. Dr. Holbein, over to you.

[00:14:57]

JOHN HOLBEIN: Great. Thanks for having me. And thank you, Lisa, for your work in this space and laying out the patterns of voter participation that we see in the electorate. So, I’m going to be talking a little bit about some of the forces that drive the patterns that Dr. Bryant was talking about. So, I’m going to be addressing this question of what affects voting of underrepresented groups. And to sort of be sort of brief about this, I want to say that there are lots of things that drive individuals’ choice to vote, both on the individual internal level and on the environmental contextual level. We have lots of research. What the citation that I put up here from Smets and van Ham from a few years ago said and called it an embarrassment of riches. That it’s really hard to summarize in about 7 to 10 minutes what we know about the root causes of voting patterns and voting inequities that we see in the population. I’m going to be focusing on a specific set of causes of patterns in voter participation of underrepresented groups.

In particular, the set of factors that I’m going to be exploring are types of policies and reforms that have been implemented over the past years, few years, across individual states that shaped the convenience of voting. So, we know, based on theoretical models from political science but also from empirical evidence, that how difficult it is to register and to vote makes a big difference and, in the case of underrepresented groups, in shaping their decision of whether or not to cast a ballot.

So, I’m going to be talking to you about some of the research that’s been done by myself and by others that looks at the effect of what are known as convenience voting laws, such as same-day registration, which allows individuals to register when they show up during early voting periods or on Election Day; early voting itself, early voting periods on patterns of voter participation of underrepresented groups; preregistration of 16- and 17-year-olds, which allows 16- and 17-year-olds to register in advance of when they turn 18 and become eligible to vote and sort of helps them clear that barrier in advance.

I’m going to be talking very briefly about voter ID laws and some of the counterintuitive and perhaps surprising findings about the effect of voter ID laws on the rates of voter participation overall and among individual subgroups, and then vote by mail, something that we saw play a very important role in 2020 but also has some interesting and substantively important findings.

So, I’m going to start with the same-day registration. So, one of the common findings that we have in political science research is that same-day registration, allowing individuals to register when they show up during early voting periods or on Election Day, increases the rates of voter participation of marginalized individuals. This study from Jacob Grumbach and Charlotte Hill look at the effect of same-day registration on patterns of youth voter participation. What they found was that consistently, across their different approaches to estimate the effect of same-day registration, the effect was somewhere on the order of increasing voter participation among young people of about—by about 3 to 7 percentage points. This also increases the number of young people who register to vote and register on Election Day and skews the electorate more towards younger voters. So, in the 23 or so states where same-day registration is available, we see that some of the patterns that Dr. Bryant showed about lower rates of youth voter participation, the gap is a little bit narrower. It’s still there. It’s still present. But the evidence suggests that same day registration increases the rates of voter participation among younger people, much more so than just the overall population. And that’s a general theme that I want to hit on today is that many of these election laws and convenience voting laws have modest effects on the population as a whole but have larger effects on these underrepresented groups.

Another example of that is with early voting periods. So, early voting allows people to skip the perhaps long lines on Election Day and cast a ballot during a window that we’re currently in for several states, including Virginia, where I am. And I wanted to point you all to this influential study from Shino and Smith from a few years ago that looked at the effects of early voting on an underrepresented group, that is, of young people specifically. What they found was that although the effects of early voting is modest among the population as a whole, they find consistent evidence that adoption of early voting, especially on campuses, made it more likely that young registrants exposed to the policy turned out to vote. So, again, modest effects among the population as a whole. But then fairly sizable effects among underrepresented groups. I’ve done some research as well on my own to show that another convenience voting reform that has this dynamic of increasing voter participation among marginalized groups is preregistration of 16- and 17-year-olds. So, in our book with Sunshine Hillygus, we find that preregistration of 16- and 17-year-olds appears to be a viable means for increasing youth voter participation. And I’m showing you the effects of that voter preregistration laws. When a state implements voter preregistration laws, it has an effect that’s about this large. This is a coefficient plot, which shows the circles are the effect estimates. So, this would suggest that when you adopt preregistration laws, you increase voter participation by about 3 to 5 percentage points. And then the bars around these estimates are uncertainty bars, which are kind of like a margin of error. So, what we find is that preregistration increases youth voter participation in a statistically significant and substantively meaningful way.

Now, to perhaps, maybe a little bit more of a surprising finding and one that we can talk a little bit more about in the Q&A if there’s interest, there’s been a lot of talk in recent years about voter ID laws. And now, a majority of US states have some form of voter ID law. What we’ve found in political science research is a pretty consistent finding across studies is that voter identification laws appear to have very modest or small or almost zero effects on the rates of voter participation of various subgroups in the electorate and overall. So, what this paper by Cantoni and Pons from a few years ago found was that voter ID laws tend to have no effect on registration or turnout overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation. In essence, what this means is that a lot of the discussion over voter ID laws has been much ado about nothing. Now, there are reasons perhaps for why these studies show a non-significant effect. But I did want to flag that as a finding that sort of bucks the traditional expectation.

Finally, I wanted to show you a little bit of research that I’ve done on the partisan impacts of election laws. So, this was particularly salient in the 2020 election when President Trump cast doubt on the efficacy and safety and the partisan fairness of convenience voting laws such as vote by mail. So, what we found, Dr. Michael Barber and I found, in a recent paper that was published in Science Advances in 2020 was that vote by mail increases the chances that both Republicans and Democrats vote. So, here again, I’m showing you a coefficient plot which shows the effect of vote-by-mail laws. On the left-hand side, turnout rates, and then on the right-hand side, Democratic vote shares. So, what we see on the left-hand side is that vote-by-mail states see a boost in rates of voter participation by about 2 to 3 percentage points as a whole. But if we look at the partisan skew of those who are participating, it’s pretty much similar across Republicans and Democrats such that there’s not an effect of vote-by-mail laws on party voting results. So, what we see is a zero effect of vote-by-mail laws on who wins elections. And this is a pretty consistent finding across convenience voting research, which shows generally that while these convenience voting laws are good for helping people to increase voter turnout, they can be good for both Republicans and Democrats. So, with that, I’ll stop there and say that I look forward to our discussion and questions on the root causes of some of the patterns and voter participation that we’ve seen in recent years.

[00:25:13]

RICK WEISS: Fantastic. Thank you, Dr. Holbein. Again, really interesting research. And it’s great to see this talked about in the format of research results instead of the usual anecdote and opinion that we hear so much on these topics in the news. So, I hope reporters will hew to some of those findings as they—as they write about these things. I want to remind reporters, first of all, that if you have questions, please put them into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen there. And while you’re doing that, I’d like to insert my own question just to get things started in these briefings. And that is basically typically to ask our guest speakers here to take on the role, not just of the experts that they are, but as news consumers themselves and how they see these issues covered in the news and ask you each if you can say something about either something that you appreciate about how these topics are covered in the news or maybe something you don’t appreciate so much and you have a little advice to reporters of how to maybe get it a little more straight. And Dr. Bryant, I’ll start with you.

[00:26:17]

LISA BRYANT: I guess, so my current research right now is looking at how election administrators are talked about in the news and how our election administration is run. So, I think that one thing—so I would say one thing I think that we do well in the United States is we actually run elections really well. And I think that it’s really easy right now for reporters to talk about the anomalies of things that go wrong in the elections. And there’s duplicate ballots. I’m talking about voter convenience measures and vote by mail. Maybe duplicate ballots get mailed to 600 voters in a jurisdiction because of the way that lists, voter lists, are provided to the vendor who prints out the ballots and mails the ballots. And so then it’s like, oh, is the election at risk because these 600 voters got duplicate ballots? But without talking about the fact that those ballots are barcoded. It’s very easy in the system to cancel those ballots. The election officials know what happened, and they knew what happened, and they corrected the problem. And so I think that that’s one thing I think that we can improve is that we can talk about the fact that 600 ballots were turned out. But we should also really reinforce the idea that this was a catch, that there was a transparency, that the election officials talked to the reporters about it and made it—made people aware of it. And that they remedied the problem right away. And I think that it’s—that’s not the sensational headline. Election official does their job well. But I think that, by and large, that’s something that is getting a lot of coverage this year as a result, of course, of some of the claims in 2020. And I think that that’s something I would like to see improved in the news.

[00:28:02]

RICK WEISS: Fantastic. Really interesting. Thank you. Dr. Holbein.

[00:28:06]

JOHN HOLBEIN: I would say that in addition to what Lisa just said, that one of the interesting things that my research has shown is that higher voter participation doesn’t always equate to or doesn’t always necessarily mean that Democrats are advantaged by it. It is the case that there are a lot of Republican non-voters in the United States and that many reforms that increase voter participation or raise voter participation have these sort of parity effects on voter participation among Republicans and Democrats. So, I think we should be—It’s an opportunity for us to be careful consumers and also to push back on narratives that come out from various sources that suggest that voter participation is a Democrat’s game. It’s not. And many of these reforms that I talked about and other reforms that have been shown to increase voter participation can both advantage—or can have sort of party neutral effects.

[00:29:14]

RICK WEISS: OK, great. All right. We’ll start turning to some questions here. This is one directed to you, Lisa, from Sarah Cutler, from the Idaho Statesman. “You touched on the rural-urban divide and party affiliation. I was wondering whether you have any insights on suburban voters. Do they fall somewhere in the middle? Are there any studies looking at that demographic?”

[00:29:40]

LISA BRYANT: So, I’m going to say I actually don’t—I haven’t seen a lot of studies, particularly on suburban voters. And so John might have something that he can say that he knows. But I would imagine that it probably depends on the suburban area you’re talking about. So, if you’re outside a really densely populated democratic city, that, I would imagine, that those might lean blue but be more purple than the city, of course. There’s reasons that people move to the suburbs, not only cost, but schools and various reasons that they might not want to live in the city. And so I would imagine that those areas are fairly purple. I guess I would also like to say that, by and large, I think that the red-blue divide is sort of an artifact. We do know that people tend to—And that was a precinct-level map. And precincts are a little bit more divided than if we look at entire cities or counties where lots of areas are varying shades of purple. And so I don’t know. I don’t know, John, maybe you have insight into the suburb more than I do. But I haven’t seen a lot of studies just on suburban voters.

[00:30:41]

JOHN HOLBEIN: Yeah, a lot of the discussion that I’ve seen as well is breaking by the sort of urban-rural characterization. We do have some research that suggests that suburban voters sort of fall along traditional lines of patterns of voter participation. So, I’m thinking about an article published by Oliver and Ha in the American Political Science Review in 2007 that basically came to the conclusion that suburban voters are—look a lot like the patterns that Lisa showed us in terms of voter turnout with more educated, more affluent, more racially homogeneous individuals being more likely to participate than minorities and the reverse. So, we don’t have a lot of research on suburban voters. I think it’s a really great question. Yeah.

[00:31:42]

RICK WEISS: Yeah, it’s interesting because it seems like we hear about suburban voters and maybe suburban women a lot from candidates. It seems to be groups that they talk about a lot. And yet, it sounds like we don’t really know maybe what they really represent or what would work to get them to lean one way or the other. So, that’s obviously not a science yet. So, let’s take this question from Brianna Vaccari from the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative in California, right in the Fresno domain, perhaps. “Is there any research on how income or poverty do or don’t affect turnout? Do regions with high rates of poverty see lower turnout?” Either one of you have some data on that?

[00:32:25]

LISA BRYANT: Yeah, there’s a lot of data on that. I don’t know, John, if you want to take the question or I can. But income is not as closely correlated—I’ll start, and maybe you can jump in. Income is not as closely correlated with turnout as education level is. Though, it’s still a fairly strong correlation. And we’ve seen consistently that higher-income voters are more likely to vote than lower-income voters. But again, that is an interesting variable when we look at it because there’s variation by election. So, for example, in 2016, you had really strong appeals by both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to those who were lower income and talking about working class and things like that. And so you saw more participation, more people enter into voting as those appeals went out. But I will say that there is a—there is a moderate to strong correlation. And it’s fairly consistent that higher-income voters are more likely to vote. But again, there’s some variance there.

[00:33:26]

JOHN HOLBEIN: I would totally agree with what Lisa said. I think that the research on the effects of income on voter participation is a bit more mixed than what we see with research on education. It is definitely the case that voting is correlated with social affluence. So, people are better educated, people who live in communities where more people are participating around them, people who live in communities where things are generally going better tend to participate at a higher level. That being said, there is some countervailing research in political science that suggests that when things go wrong, when the economy is particularly not doing as well, for example, say there’s a boom or a bust in a local community, that that affects voter participation in interesting and countervailing ways. So, we might expect, based on some theories of voting and political science research in a literature called retrospective voting or democratic accountability voting, that when things go wrong, when communities experience especially a harsh drop off in the performance of their economy, perhaps, that voter participation actually goes up, that people get mad, and they blame elected officials, and they show up at the ballot box to express their concern. So, it’s an area that has a lot of mixed and nuanced findings. And I would totally agree with what Lisa said about the breakdown of education being a lot cleaner than by income.

[00:35:13]

RICK WEISS: Okay. And it looks like the Valley is tuning in to you today, Lisa. And here’s a question from Rachel Livinal from KVPR Valley Public Radio. “Dr. Bryant, you shared insights on nationwide data and specifically on education and age’s role in voter turnout. Considering that the Valley generally has low rates of college-educated folks, are there any insights you can give into voter turnout for this region of California?”

[00:35:42]

LISA BRYANT: Yeah, so we actually, the Central Valley in California, has consistently the lowest turnout in the state. Fresno County is a little bit higher than some of our surrounding counties. I think Tulare County, Kings County tend to be even lower than us, which is fascinating because we have, I think, two of the twenty-four competitive districts in the country. And yet, we have really low turnout. And there’s a couple of things related to what we talked about today that contribute to that. One, we have a very large minority population. We’re 63, 65 percent Latino, but a lot of those are first-generation and ineligible. So, this gets also into when I was talking about when we look at voting age population versus voting eligible population. There’s—we have a large ineligible population in the Central Valley. So, those people who are not citizens are not eligible to vote. And then part of that, there is research in political science about what we call socialization, that parents socialize you into participation. So, you can imagine that if you’re children of immigrants and your parents don’t talk about politics at home or your parents are not involved in the American political system and are not voters, that you don’t necessarily grow up learning the value of voting or think that you have a role in the system. And so that’s another thing that we see. I’ll talk to my students about voting, and they’ll say my parents don’t vote. I didn’t really ever grow up talking about voting or thinking about voting. And so I think that that really affects our region as well because we have such a large first-generation and immigrant population in the Central Valley. But, yes, I think that there’s a combination of low education, low income. We have high poverty rates in the Central Valley, a very, very strong working-class population in the Central Valley. And then also just the socialization, just the habitualization and learning how to be a citizen isn’t as strong in this area as it is in some. And I think all of those contribute to our low turnout here.

[00:37:47]

RICK WEISS: Interesting. OK. We have a question that’s not from the Central Valley. This is from Allison Moore from Storm Lake Times in Iowa with a great broad question here that I think maybe both of you can weigh in on. Just asking, “What are some questions that you wish more journalists were investigating right now in this domain of voter access and voter turnout? What are the stories that they should be following? ”

[00:38:13]

JOHN HOLBEIN: I can start with that. So, one of the, I think, the areas of great promise each election, or at least it appears each election, in the narrative of about what’s going to happen in the upcoming election is why young voters have voted at such low rates in recent years. And what will happen in the coming election? So, Lisa presented some data that was really interesting and informative about this in showing that patterns of youth voter participation are up in recent years but generally lower than what—the rates of voter participation among older citizens. And we see pretty consistently in polls of who young people support that it’s pretty democratic. It’s by sort of like a 2 to 1 majority, young people sort of skew Democratic. And so it’s possible, it’s possible if we see a pattern of increased youth voter participation that continues the trend from 2020 to 2024 that we could see a real hefty weight of young voters that we haven’t seen in the past. So, for me, that’s kind of a selfish thing to plug because I wrote a book about this, Making Young Voters. And so I think a lot about the next generation of young voters and what their contemporary voting patterns look like in the current environment of polarization and an information-rich environment where there is just a lot of political conflict. So, that’s one thing that I would think.

[00:40:01]

RICK WEISS: And I’m interested to hear your thoughts as well, Lisa. But I’ll just mention I recall from a previous briefing, maybe one that you were in, John, that it’s very interesting that young voters respond, when asked if they intend to vote, respond at very high levels, yes, I intend to. And yet, year after year, election after election, those levels are lower than what promised. So, it’s a very interesting question, too, about why, in the end, they don’t follow through on what they said they were going to do.

[00:40:27]

JOHN HOLBEIN: Certainly makes it tricky to make prognostications about where the youth vote will be in an upcoming election for sure.

[00:40:33]

RICK WEISS: Right. Lisa, did you want to add anything for some story ideas or things that reporters might want to dig into?

[00:40:43]

LISA BRYANT: No, I would like to follow up. I think also John mentioned in his presentation about I think that digging more into, are there actually these sort of partisan effects? Because I think that that’s a partisan talking point. But I agree with the research John presented, and I have some research. So, I, full disclosure, sit on the ERIC Advisory Board. And ERIC, as many of you know, it’s the Electronic Registration Information Center. And what it is, is it’s a clearinghouse that states enter into. It’s bipartisan. There are states from both parties. It used to be more bipartisan. And it was in the news a lot because several states pulled out. And what it does is it helps election administrators clean their voter rolls to make sure that voter rolls don’t have dead weight.

And I guess that’s one story that I also think it’s sort of misrepresented. Anytime there’s a purge, it’s assumed that that’s bad. But purges are necessary to clean voter rolls. You don’t want to send ballots out to people who are no longer living in your district, for example, or in your jurisdiction. And so one thing I think I would like to see journalists dig into more is, first of all, are these kinds of systems, like belonging to ERIC, is there really a partisan advantage? I have a paper under review with Mike Hanmer right now where we look at participation of ERIC states. And we don’t find partisan advantage for either Republicans or Democrats in Nevada or Pennsylvania. And we also looked at Washington. We didn’t find it there either. And so consistent with the research that Dr. Holbein presented, these reforms, they change—that reform, being part of a collaborative to clean voter rolls makes for cleaner, more secure elections. And so withdrawing from a compact like that where you can clean the rolls in a systematic way and share information with people in other states about people moving across jurisdictions and stuff, it makes for a better, more secure election. And it helps us make sure that the voters who should be on the rolls in a state are because states are required to reach out to people saying we think you’re an eligible voter. Our records show you’re not registered. Do you want to be registered here? Those are the kinds of things that states are doing, and I think the reforms that we’re not talking about a lot. But we’re also not talking a lot about the fact that the politicians, the partisan politicians, are leading the conversations on a lot of these and talking about that there’s partisan advantages but not backing it up with evidence. And I think the research that John and I are doing shows there’s actually not partisan advantages to things like vote centers and early voting and being a part of ERIC and vote by mail for most places. And so I think digging more into what the data shows and the research shows and not necessarily—I know that you guys are under time crunches and things like that. And I completely understand that. But I think it’s out there. The data is out there to show that those are not actually partisan advantages.

[00:43:41]

RICK WEISS: Well, all that is music to our ears at SciLine. And I’ll repeat, as I did at the beginning, that for reporters who want to make sure they get to the data and beyond the talking points of the political voices, we’re here to help you find people like these two who can tell you what the data show. We do have a follow-up here from Brianna Vaccari from Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. And this, I think, is relevant to lots of parts of the United States, not just to the Valley, where there’s growing Hispanic populations and participation in the voting system. “Any tips,” she’s asking, “for discussing the Latino vote or things to avoid that you see in the media?”

[00:44:22]

JOHN HOLBEIN: I think this is not completely my area of expertise, so I feel a little uncomfortable answering this question as an authoritative expert. But I’m aware of research that has been done by others who are in this space. So, I would just point you towards Pew’s recent report on this. So, in January of this year, Pew released a seminal report called Key Facts About the Hispanic Eligible Voters in 2024, Key Facts About Hispanic Eligible Voters in 2024, that’s Pew, where they outlined a lot of great information about the trends of Hispanic levels of voter participation. And I think the takeaway, one of the takeaways from that report for me was that though Hispanics vote at lower rates than the white citizens, the fraction of the electorate, given the growth that we’ve seen among that community continuously, the fraction of the electorate that is Hispanic is changing. It’s increasing. So, it’s an interesting finding. I think it’s an important area of research. One other—one other set of findings that I would point folks to is research by Bernard Fraga, Bernard Fraga, who’s at Emory University. He has a great book called The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America. It’s called The Turnout Gap by Professor Bernard Fraga, where he really explores the origins and patterns of voter participation along these dimensions that we’re talking about, including among Black voters and Hispanic voters. So, those are just two resources that immediately jumped to mind. Lisa, I don’t know if you have any other things to say about this.

[00:46:14]

LISA BRYANT: Yeah, I would say in terms of when we look at Latino or Latinx participation, one thing that is true is that if we look at the patterns of turnout, they’re very consistent with everybody else. So, women tend to vote Democrat more than men. The Latinx with more education vote in higher rates than those who don’t. There is an income relationship there as well. So, when you have sort of educated, more professional white class, you get more participation than working class. I would say there are a couple of other. In addition to Bernard Fraga, I would say Matt Barreto has great research on this. He’s at UCLA. Gabe Sanchez, who’s at University of New Mexico, has a lot of really good research on Latino turnout. There’s some really great people. UCLA has a Latino participation lab, and so they produce a lot of research out of there. So, if you’re looking for a resource also, in addition to Pew, which is great, you could find that there. And then one of the links I put in my slides, which I think will be shared, the University of Florida Election Lab also has some good graphics and data on the share of—the vote share that is now made up of Latinx voters. And so that’s, if you want to find that there, it’s in a link in one of my slides.

[00:47:39]

RICK WEISS: Great. That’s a lot of great resources. And I see one of the links going up there in the chat for people who want to grab that. Here’s a question that maybe one or the other of you can handle. “Is there a history of ballot referenda like the abortion issues on many state ballots this year driving—do those drive a change in turnout for one party more than the other? Can they make a difference on the—beyond that particular issue?”

[00:48:06]

LISA BRYANT: I don’t know, John, if you want to do that. There is some, if we look at the data for certain types of ballot initiatives or ballot issues, they can drive turnout. And so we’ve seen special elections obviously drove turnout. But the interesting thing is so if we look at Ohio, for example, had the special election that included the abortion ban on the ballot. You saw turnout go up, but you saw turnout go up in both parties. It’s just that there was more, what we would say, if you expected that Republicans were going to perfectly align on that issue on one side, we didn’t see that in that election. And so I think that that’s another thing that maybe we could get at, is especially abortion as an issue is more nuanced than people think. It tends to be presented in you’re either pro-life or pro-choice. But when you go into the data, and again, we’re not sponsored by Pew, but I’m going to push that Pew has some really good data on this. When you break that question down into various types of policies, is it a full ban? is it in particular cases—rape, incest, things like that? you see a lot more variation even by party in opinion and support for those policy issues. Marijuana was a huge one that drove young voter turnout on ballot initiatives across the country when places like Michigan and South Dakota were putting this on the ballot, which are very—South Dakota is a super traditional conservative red state. And yet, they passed legalized marijuana. And it increased turnout among some of those non-habitual voters who may have showed up for other reasons. And so you can definitely see ballot initiatives and ballot referenda drive turnout and bring new people into the franchise. So, I don’t know if John has more to add to that.

[00:49:53]

JOHN HOLBEIN: Yeah, I think—I think that’s all right. And I think one important—We’re all talking about 2024, but eventually, election 2025 and 2026 will happen. And as we think about the generalized ability of this, it kind of depends on the context of these ballot referenda. So, in 2024, I would expect voter turnout to be much higher, regardless of whether or not a ballot referendum is happening, as Lisa showed in her slides. But it is the case that I would still classify some of these ballot referenda that happen in off-cycle elections as being relatively low turnout, where certain groups and demographics might skew the results a little bit more so than others. So, I think the context matters a little bit when we’re thinking about ballot referenda.

[00:50:48]

RICK WEISS: Okay. I’m going to try to squeeze in one or two more questions before we end. And we’ve got one question here on ranked choice voting and wondering whether it makes a difference in turnout. And I wonder if either of you could speak to the question of whether it achieves what I understand is one of its goals of sort of eliminating more extreme candidates in the end and centricizing the election process? Either of you have anything to say about that?

[00:51:19]

LISA BRYANT: We could split it up if you want. I don’t know.

[00:51:22]

JOHN HOLBEIN: I know that there was—I know that there was a recent article that came out in the journal Electoral Studies. Sorry, Lisa, to talk over you.

[00:51:29]

LISA BRYANT: That’s okay.

[00:51:30]

JOHN HOLBEIN: That is called Does Ranked Choice Voting Increase Voter Turnout and Mobilization? They studied this topic extensively. They argue, and they seem to find that significant and substantively higher rates of voter participation occur in places that have ranked choice voting. And that campaigns in ranked choice voting places have sort of a greater incentive to do the types of things that mobilize voters, like reach out to them. So, that, again, was, Does Ranked Choice Voting Increase Voter Turnout and Mobilization? It’s in the Journal of Electoral Studies from just last month, August 2024.

[00:52:16]

RICK WEISS: Great. Great resource.

[00:52:19]

LISA BRYANT: I think, if I recall, David Kimball and Joseph—I’m drawing a blank—Anthony, Joseph Anthony have a piece on ranked choice voting. I think they have a piece called Ranked Choice Voting Is an Acquired Taste. And I believe that I’ve seen research that shows that ranked choice voting, when it’s newly adopted, it’s sort of shiny, and everybody wants to participate. But then participation sort of goes back to pre-ranked choice levels after a couple of cycles. We don’t have a lot of jurisdictions yet that have been using ranked choice voting for a long time. We have—we have—and certainly no statewide. Maine is the first statewide. And so we don’t really have longitudinal data on that yet. But I think that they do see sort of a spike when initially adopted and people want to see how everything works. And then it sort of falls off over time. I have not seen any research really that shows—I think the expectation was it’s going to bring more centrist candidates. And I don’t think that that has worked, by and large, is what I believe. But I have to go back and review that, I think, because most of that research has been done. There’s some in the Bay Area that’s been done on that. And so there might just not be enough variance. I don’t know.

[00:53:37]

RICK WEISS: OK. I want to remind reporters, as we get close to wrapping up here, that when you do log off from this briefing today, you will get prompted for a small survey. And although I know we’re all tired of filling out surveys for whether we like things or not or how things could be better, it really helps us at SciLine. If you take just the half a minute to answer three or four quick questions, that will help us keep designing these briefings in ways that are most useful to you on a practical basis. So, please, please take that half a minute or a minute to do that. I want to just do something I like to do at the end of these briefings regularly, which is to just ask each of our participants here to take a half a minute or a minute at the most and just give reporters here a take-home message. If there’s one thing you want them to leave with one concept or idea, what would that be? And Lisa, how about you?

[00:54:27]

LISA BRYANT: I think that one concept I’d like to leave is that if you have a question about something going on in voting or elections, that there is probably somebody out there who is researching it. And I think that most academics in this space are pretty accessible and that most of us would like for things to be represented accurately and fairly and with data behind them because I think a big part of our job that we didn’t anticipate when we were getting our Ph.D. is trying to counter misinformation and disinformation and sort of challenge partisan rhetoric. So, to the extent that you have time to follow up with us, and I know we’re sometimes hard to get a hold of, but I would say reach out to the community because I think it’s a really good community that does elections research. And I think, ultimately, we would rather see some claims challenged with facts than just let them go.

[00:55:21]

RICK WEISS: A great reminder. And I’ll remind reporters, as we do in some of our trainings, that political scientists are not the same as TV pundits. Okay? We’re talking about political scientists here. Okay. John, how about a take-home message from you?

[00:55:34]

JOHN HOLBEIN: I would—I would just echo first what Lisa said. If we don’t know the answer to your question about voting, we probably know someone who does. So, I put myself out there as someone to reach out to as well. My takeaway message is that voting is not necessarily a Democrats’ game. It’s a—voter participation is it’s a great opportunity to fulfill the democratic ideals that our country was built upon. And there are many instances where we see again and again that raising rates of voter participation doesn’t necessarily mean that Democrats win. So, we have to be careful when we tell those stories and that we make sure that we say that voting is an Americans game. It’s not necessarily just a Democrats’ game.

[00:56:23]

RICK WEISS: Really nice take-home point. Thank you both so much for shedding some light on really what the research says, what the facts are on these really complicated opinion-generating topics. It’s great to sort of get grounded in the science here. Thanks to you reporters for tuning in and being open to including this kind of data in your political reporting. And I look forward to seeing you all at another SciLine media briefing in the future. Take care.