The great unknown of the 2024 election: voter turnout

Despite the high emotions on both sides, we may very well see a drop-off in turnout that has little to do with the candidates.

Polls show an incredibly tight presidential race, but one factor that polling has a hard time revealing is who will actually show up to vote. Looking at the history of presidential elections, turnout fluctuates in unexpected ways.

2024 may be no different. Despite the high emotions on both sides, we may very well see a drop-off in turnout that has little to do with the candidates.

It is easy to be fooled by the last election. With so much of the vote taken by absentee ballots, 2020 was a huge outlier; 62 percent of eligible voters participated, the highest turnout since 1960. And even that understates the case — when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon, the country was almost half its current size, the age limit for voters was 21 and Jim Crow laws denied many Black Americans the ballot. Since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1972, only Barack Obama’s 2008 victory saw a vote total as high as 57 percent.

Perhaps a more important data point for 2020 is that its increase of 7.2 percent from the previous election was the second-highest bump in the 20th century — the only larger jump was between the postwar election in 1948 to Dwight Eisenhower’s victory in 1952.

So voter turnout has increased for two straight elections. In U.S. history, there has only been one span when turnout managed to increase for three straight elections — from 2000 to 2004 to 2008, and that occurred after a steep fall-off in 1996.

There have been three “rematch” elections in American history: 1892 (Grover Cleveland vs. Benjamin Harrison), 1900 (William McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryant) and 1956 (Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson). In each one, turnout dropped the second time around — a possible omen if the contest is indeed Biden vs. Trump. Additionally, in the three other cases where a previous losing candidate won the nomination — which happened in 1908, 1948 and 1968 — turnout dropped from the last time they were on the ballot.

So we may be due for another drop. Which leads to two big questions: Would a more exciting set of candidates help drive up turnout? And which party benefits from lower turnout?

There have been a lot of complaints about voters being sick of both Biden and Trump, but the reality is that having an exciting candidate does not boost overall turnout much. Few people today would put either Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford in the same class as Ronald Reagan in terms of generating voter enthusiasm, but the turnout in 1976 was higher than in either of Reagan’s victories.

Going further back, Theodore Roosevelt, arguably the most exciting American president, was replaced by his polar opposite in personality, William Howard Taft. But Taft’s victory in 1908 saw higher turnout than Roosevelt’s in 1904. Perhaps more surprising, the historic 1912 election — where Taft lost reelection against Woodrow Wilson, with Roosevelt running on the Progressive Party line and Eugene Debs running as a Socialist — saw lower turnout than either of those races.

Recent popular presidents, such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Dwight Eisenhower, saw turnout spikes in their original election, with the numbers falling back to earth for their reelection runs. Turnout can move in a short time as well — the numbers from 1988 to 1996 saw a 5 percent jump and then a 6 percent decline.

It’s not clear what underlies these turnout rollercoaster rides. Probably the best hint is the perception that the election is very tight and your vote could actually matter, which would explain why races such as 1916, 1960, 1976 and 2004 were higher than previous years. But that’s clearly not everything. The razor-close 1968 race saw a slight drop turnout from LBJ’s 1964 blowout, and the dragged-out 2000 election was only a little bit higher than Clinton’s runaway success in 1996.

Outside factors, especially economic ones, would seem to be the main driver of turnout. The biggest recent jumps were in 1992 and 2008, which both saw recessions, and 2020, during the height of the massive economic dislocation from the pandemic. On the other hand, 1932, the first election during the Great Depression, saw turnout decline from the otherwise anodyne 1928 race.

The reality is that it is not clear exactly why turnout climbs and dips from one election to another. But if the basic pattern — that it doesn’t keep rising over multiple elections — holds, then we would expect to see a drop, perhaps a significant one, in November.

Who would benefit from a turnout drop? Republicans have long suspected that they would benefit, and, in the past, the GOP did well in times of decreased turnout, such as the 1920s and the Nixon-Reagan era of the 1970s to ’80s.

But the parties looked very different at that time. Education and income are the biggest factors in calculating whether a voter will turn out. In recent years, voters who are more educated and many who are higher earners have gravitated to the Democrats. Whether that will be a help is hard to say, but it may give Biden some comfort amidst his recent tough polling.

Voter turnout is always a big issue in an election, but the parties and candidates may have limited power in actually driving turnout. The previous few elections may be the best indicator of whether people will show up to the polls in November.

Joshua Spivak is a senior fellow at the Hugh Carey Institute for Government Reform based at Wagner College and is a senior research fellow at Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center. He is the author of "Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom.”