The Enlightened Despot

There’s been a lot of talk about whether the increase in voter turnout met expectations. (The obvious answer is that it depends on whose expectations we’re talking about.) More interesting than the overall increase in turnout from 2004, which was 1.5%, is the state-by-state breakdown, showing where that increase came from. Here’s a list of states that saw the largest jump in turnout (as calculated by subtracting the percentage of eligible voters that voted in 2004 from the percentage that voted in 2008):

1.) North Carolina: 8.0%
2.) Virginia: 6.8%
3.) DC: 6.6%
4.) Mississippi: 5.6%
South Carolina: 5.6%
6.) Georgia: 4.9%
Maryland: 4.9%
8.) Alabama: 4.6%
9.) Indiana: 4.5%

This is a pretty remarkable list, so I’m going to go ahead and remark on a few aspects of it:

- The first eight states on the list form a contiguous region. This, to me, was the most amazing result of this exercise. Presumably this is, for the most part, not a simple causal relationship; bordering states often have a lot in common demographically. Nevertheless, it seems quite plausible that there is a certain amount of spillover here, where states which weren’t in play were hit by a lot of advertising because they were in the same media markets as states that were.

- Perhaps the least surprising result is that the turnout went up a lot in states with a large black population. Compare the list above to this one, which ranks states by the (relative) size of their black citizenry:

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