In 2016, 136.8 million Americans voted in the presidential election.
They represented turnout of 59% of what demographers and polsters call the Voting Eligible Population, hereafter the VEP.
This is different from the Voting Age Population, the VAP.
Both VEP and VAP refer to people of voting age, 18 years, in the United States. The difference is that the VAP includes millions who cannot vote because they are in prison, on parole or are not citizens so it is a really irrelvant category. If you are legally ineligible to vote, you are irrelvant to the numbers who are eligible, or any understanding of them.
So we will talk here in terms of the VEP, that is those who are citizens 18 years or older and eligible to vote. Of course they must register to actually vote.
(All statistics here are gleaned from various reliable sources via Internet searches.)
In 2016 the VEP numbered 233 million. Total turnout was 137 million votes. As noted, measued as a percentage of VEP, turnout was 59%. VEP has increased more than 40 million since the Year 2000 with 75% of the increase attributed to Black, Latino/Latina and Asian Americans.
The 2016 U.S. voter participation placed the United States between Luxembourg and Latvia among democratic nations in recent national elections; far down the list from Belgium, which had 87% participation in the same relevant period, indeed well below every European and Asian democracy.
In the 2018 U.S. mid-term election turnout was 118.5 million, some 49.5% of those eligible to vote. It was a startling increase over the 2014 mid-term when just 36% of the VEP cast ballots; and the highest mid-term turnout, measured as a perentage, in the more than 100 years since 1914, when 50% voted in a time in which only men could vote.
The 2018 turnout of 118.5 million voters was a 35 milion-vote or 42% increase over 83.5 million mid-term votes cast in 2014 . The surge propelled Democrats to re-take the House of Representatives.
Now we are in 2020, a year that by anyone’s memory is the most dramatic, life-changing event in the United States perhaps since Dec. 7, 1941.
It is a year that has seen more upheaval, more urgency, greater global unsettling of populations than any year in all of our lifetimes excepting perhaps for the most elderly, who yet have memory of WWII. Even then, this might well seem worse to them now. Then they were children, today they are aged and at risk.
Part of the turmoil is the U.S. presidential election, heaving and swirling, tossed, tossing and turning for more than six months now through the global pandemic with lines ever more sharply drawn over the toxic presidency of Donald Trump.
It would be consequential in steadier times, it is all the more so in the circumstances of 2020 given that the election will decide the political fate of a man more unfit, unsteady, unready and unequal to the task of being president than any who ever held the office.
The election will decide the course of the United States of America not for just the next four years but for as far as we can see into the misty future. It will, without exaggeration, decide the future of our republican form of government, our democracy and our nation’s place in the world for decades to come.
Because of the circumstances of the pandemic more people are voting early in more ways than ever in the history of the U.S., both in real numbers and in percentages of VEP perhaps more so than during the Civil War or during WWII, when 16 milion in a then U.S. population of 130 million served in uniform. Today, there are 330 million of us.
How they vote, on what schedules, where, with what varying opportunities to submit an early ballot depends on the states in which the regisestered live and are distributed.
In Mercer County, N.J. (where I live) with a population of 367,000 there are 16 official drop boxes for voters to deposit the paper ballots sent to all New Jersey registered voters.
In Harris County, Texas which includes the City of Houston and has total population of 4.4 million in a land area larger than Rhode Island, by order of the governor of Texas, by his dictate alone, there is one (1) vote deposit location. Say that again: one drop box for a county with 4.4 million people.
Without doubt this represents the single greatest, most overt and loathsome act of voter suppression in the history of the United States – and that is saying a lot.
Why would Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas have done this, why did he do it? He did it first because he could because the Roberts Supreme Court by a 5-4 decision ripped the guts out of the U.S. Voting Rights Act, the one passed in 1965 soon after the late Rep. John Lewis was beaten bloody by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. marching to get that law passed.
But the main reason Gov. Abbott did this? Not because he cares so much about the outcome of the presidential race, though he does, as he cares about the outcome of the vote in two week for the Texas House of Representatives.
Republian control of that chamber for decades is in peril after Democratic gains in 2018. If 9 of the 150 Texas House seats turnover to Democrats they will take control and everything in Texas politics and government will be upended, including congressional redistricting. That above all is why Abbott is nakedly suppresssing the vote.
A poll released Oct. 21 shows Democrat Joe Biden tied with President Donald Trump in Texas, and generally within striking distance in most polls in the Lone Star State – polls that also show something of far greater consequence to Gov. Abbott and Texas Republicans than the presidential race – that their hold on the Texas House really is in danger.
Then what do the presidential polls show lately?
First, polls historially tighten in the final two weeks of a campaign as the undecided choose. But this year the polls show generally 5% or less of the electorate to be late deciders, at least one-half to even one-third less than usual.
Second, the public polls have been largely consistent nationally as they have also been in the so-called battleground states, and consistent within themselves. If a poll shows a 10 point Biden national advantage it has been a consistent finding of that poll over time. If it shows a 5% Biden advantage that generally has been an internally consistent finding of the same poll.
Overall generally the the steady mean average of the polls shows Biden about 8% to 9% ahead of Trump nationally, and generally holding leads ranging from 2% to 8% in several key states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada.
They show virtual ties in other contested states like North Carolina, Iowa and Florida, the latter being the keystone on any path to reelection for Trump. Biden can win the presidency without Florida. Trump cannot. Without Texas and its 38 electoral votes, whether now or in the future, no Republican could win the presidency.
The pundits are agog at the early voting, which as of this writing 14 days ahead of the election is at 39 million, 28% of 2016 turnout . The pundits and voting experts predict by Election Day, Nov. 3, as much as 60% of the vote is likely to be cast and the early voting is more than on pace for that.
Early voting takes three forms, by postal mail, depositing ballots in official election drop boxes, or voting at an actual polling station.
The early vote, again according to the pundits and their sources in state election offices, has split about 2-to-1 Democratic. All of which means? Absolutely nothing.
We do not know how many will actually vote early against the real final turnout. We do not know how that will break out finally between the two parties. We do not know how many will vote on Election Day the traditional way or how such in-person voting will work with pandemic social distancing.
We do not know how much interference there will be at the polls from gun loonies ginned up by Trump or thugs masquerading as poll watchers.
All that aside then, how many votes are likely to be cast when all is said and done?
How many more than the 137 million who voted in 2016 will vote, how many more than the 129.5 million who voted for Trump or Hillary Clinton that year will choose between Trump or Biden? Will the total of 7.5 million votes squandered on third party and write-in candidates in 2016 increase or decrease?
The rise in voting in the 2018 mid-term over the 2014 mid-term produced an actual increase in the number of ballots cast of 35 million – from 83 million votes cast in 2014 to 118.5 million in 2018, a stunning 42% increase.
If 2016 participation of 137 million voters increased by 42% this year it would mean a turnout over 194 million. That number might well be or could actually exceed the current total registration though, again, that figure could not be readily obtained.
Still current informed estimates of the number expected to vote range from 150 million to 160 million. VEP participation, which as noted was 59% in 2016 would rise to between 63% and 67% in either of those scenarios.
Let’s test two numbers. First, let’s use a mid-range number, 152 million turnout, which projects about a 11% vote increase over 2016.
That would make each point in the current polls and in the election itself worth 1.52 million votes.
Assuming the wasted third party vote reduces by about half from 2016 down to 4 million leaves 148 million votes to be divided between Trump and Biden, which would be 19 million more than the total for Clinton and Trump in 2016, a nearly 15% increase. That is a not a lot, it is a helluva lot.
Applying the steady Biden national polling advantage of 8 points to the projected 152 million would produce a 12 million vote advantage for Biden, translating into a 52.6% share to 44.7% for Tump with all others garnering 2.7%. Play with that, make it Biden 52%, Trump 45% and all others 3%. That becomes Biden, 79 milion votes, Trump 68.4 million votes, a 10.6 million vote difference. Reducing the Biden presumption to 50% with Trump at 47% and all others 3%, results in a national vote difference between Biden and Trump of 4.5 million votes. But again, the polls to date are running at an average 8% Biden lead.
Next test the notion of 160 million votes for president, adjusting the throw away, wasted votes to 5 million. That would mean 155 million votes cast for Biden or Trump, with each percent of the total being 1.6 million votes. Assuming wasted ballots a constant at 3%, Biden at 52% means Trump at 45%, with a Biden advantage of 11.2 million votes, 83.2 million votes to 72 million for Trump. Reducing Biden to 51% and raising Trump to 46% results in a popular vote Biden win twice that of Hillary Clinton’s 2.9 million vote spread; being 81.6 million for Biden to 75.4 million for Trump, a differenece 0f 6.2 million votes. Put Biden at 50%, Trump at 47% with the wasted vote steady at 3% results in 80 million votes for Biden to 75.2 million for Trump, a difference of 4.8 million votes.
Thus reasonable scenarios extrapolated from curent polling mean 2020 very much likely will be the 5th time the Democratic candidate for president will be the popular vote winner in 6 national elections since 2000. A Democrat has been president twice since 2000 notwithstanding being the popular vote winner in four of the five presidential contests held so far in this century.
Democrat Biden almost certainly will win the popular vote Nov. 3 by a very clear, even a very large margin, in fact almost certainly by a majority of all who vote if the vote in any way reflects the polls to date.
But that’s not how we elect presidents as witnessed by the fact that a Democrat has been elected president in only two of the five contests since and including 2000.
Any of the results proffered above contain, no matter how much weighted for the votes of California and New York in the Democratic column or Texas in the Republican column — any of those results contains a Biden electoral vote victory. It could range from the minimum 270 electoral votes required to secure the presidency to as high as 350 electoral votes or even upwards if Texs astonishes the nation – depending on the popular vote spread. The larger the popular vote, the higher the electoral vote count should go for Biden.
There is one inexorable thing in politics as elections come into view. It is numbers. They are, once their trend is established, immutable.
The 2020 presidential election is now subject to the immutability of numbers conditioned as always by the imbalance of the Electoral College. What imbalance? As simple as that every state gets two electoral votes for its membership in the Senate. That gives Wyomong, with 500,000 population the same two Senate-credited electoral votes as California with 40 million population. Wyoming’s two Senate-generated electoral votes outweigh the two belonging to California by 80 times.
This year the immutability of numbers points to overcoming the inherent bias in the Electoral College to produce a democratic result that will elect a Democrat as president.
Peeling the Onion 