The 2016 US General Election

[DOR]

Why can’t we all be more like Minnesota?

Voter turnout in 2016, as best can be determined at this early date, was pretty good. Some 58-60% of eligible voters bothered to cast a ballot this year, right in line with the results of the previous three elections. However, the variations across states are enormous.

In Minnesota, the lowest turnout in the last ten presidential elections was 66.1%, back in 1996. In 2004, turnout hit a recent high of 78.4%, and has averaged 72.5% since 1980. That’s more than 14 points above the national average. In all, 21 states regularly turnout better than 60% when called upon to do their civic duty.

The poorest turnout is in Hawai’i, likely because national media call the election long before Hawaiian’s get a chance to vote. Turnout barely bumped up from 2004 to 2008, a year when the state actually had some skin in the game. The Aloha State’s 10-year average is a dismal 42.5%.

Next on the Hall of Shame, and with much poorer excuses, are South Carolina (48.3%), Nevada (49.8%), West Virginia (49.8%), Georgia (50.2%), Texas (50.7%), and Arizona (50.8%).

Why people don’t turn out to vote in greater numbers should be a high concern to everyone. But, more disturbing is where more people are eligible to vote from one election to the next, but fewer ballots are cast. This seems to be true this year in Iowa (45,381 more eligible voters than in 2012 but 7,180 fewer ballots cast), Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, Utah and Wisconsin. Over 10 cycles, the worst performer is West Virginia, where a typical election cycle will see an additional 4,300 eligible voters but nearly 900 fewer ballots. In Utah, the increase in ballots cast is less than 30% of the rise in eligible voters.

The most complete consistent set of data I’ve found is here: http://www.electproject.org/home/vot...r-turnout-data. It should be noted that “eligible voters” is in this study defined as the 18+ age group less those ineligible. It is thus far larger than the registered voter population.

[tantalus]

Relevant thread making the rounds:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16...l-crying-wolf/

Great blog post to be fair

[Doktor]

Voter turnout in 2016, as best can be determined at this early date, was pretty good. Some 58-60% of eligible voters bothered to cast a ballot this year, right in line with the results of the previous three elections. However, the variations across states are enormous.

In Minnesota, the lowest turnout in the last ten presidential elections was 66.1%, back in 1996. In 2004, turnout hit a recent high of 78.4%, and has averaged 72.5% since 1980. That’s more than 14 points above the national average. In all, 21 states regularly turnout better than 60% when called upon to do their civic duty.

The poorest turnout is in Hawai’i, likely because national media call the election long before Hawaiian’s get a chance to vote. Turnout barely bumped up from 2004 to 2008, a year when the state actually had some skin in the game. The Aloha State’s 10-year average is a dismal 42.5%.

Next on the Hall of Shame, and with much poorer excuses, are South Carolina (48.3%), Nevada (49.8%), West Virginia (49.8%), Georgia (50.2%), Texas (50.7%), and Arizona (50.8%).

Why people don’t turn out to vote in greater numbers should be a high concern to everyone. But, more disturbing is where more people are eligible to vote from one election to the next, but fewer ballots are cast. This seems to be true this year in Iowa (45,381 more eligible voters than in 2012 but 7,180 fewer ballots cast), Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, Utah and Wisconsin. Over 10 cycles, the worst performer is West Virginia, where a typical election cycle will see an additional 4,300 eligible voters but nearly 900 fewer ballots. In Utah, the increase in ballots cast is less than 30% of the rise in eligible voters.

The most complete consistent set of data I’ve found is here: http://www.electproject.org/home/vot...r-turnout-data. It should be noted that “eligible voters” is in this study defined as the 18+ age group less those ineligible. It is thus far larger than the registered voter population.

DOR,

Is there a study of the turnout of registered voters? By my guestimate it'd be over 80% on federal level, but what about states?

Other WABbers,

Do you guys think above 80% of registered is OK? Why bother registering and then not showing up?

A friend of mine usually says that his vote is worth for 2 votes of those who didn't show up (here we have 60-70% (of all voters) turnout on parliamentary and local elections and about 50-ish on presidential and people say it is a low turnout.

[citanon]

DOR,

Is there a study of the turnout of registered voters? By my guestimate it'd be over 80% on federal level, but what about states?

Other WABbers,

Do you guys think above 80% of registered is OK? Why bother registering and then not showing up?

A friend of mine usually says that his vote is worth for 2 votes of those who didn't show up (here we have 60-70% (of all voters) turnout on parliamentary and local elections and about 50-ish on presidential and people say it is a low turnout.

Why bother voting when you already know the outcome?

This year in California for example, there was 100 percent certainty Hillary Clinton would win the presidential ballot. So, why did I even bother showing up?

Well, I showed up to vote on state and local issues, you know, the ones no one even talk about on social media.

So, after the election I tried to find the California state and local results. This was surprisingly difficult..

So what's the bottom line? In most years there is no rational reason for voters in non battleground states to turn up unless, A: they are pissed off or super enthused or B: local issues.

In an era if dying newspaper subscription local issues have gone further to the back row. The counter to this effect is peer shaming on social media. Otherwise if you want your voters to turn up, fire them up about some state or local issues, and ffs, actually publicize the results online.

[Doktor]

Why bother voting when you already know the outcome?

This year in California for example, there was 100 percent certainty Hillary Clinton would win the presidential ballot. So, why did I even bother showing up?

Well, I showed up to vote on state and local issues, you know, the ones no one even talk about on social media.

So, after the election I tried to find the California state and local results. This was surprisingly difficult..

So what's the bottom line? In most years there is no rational reason for voters in non battleground states to turn up unless, A: they are pissed off or super enthused or B: local issues.

In an era if dying newspaper subscription local issues have gone further to the back row. The counter to this effect is peer shaming on social media. Otherwise if you want your voters to turn up, fire them up about some state or local issues, and ffs, actually publicize the results online.

The POTUS wont make you a park or a bus station, or build a school, you know, everyday things that actually improve your life.

[citanon]

The POTUS wont make you a park or a bus station, or build a school, you know, everyday things that actually improve your life.

But you see, that's the opposite of focus of most election drive efforts, which is why they don't succeed. This is the opposite of the NRA, which is advocating about what's in your gun cabinet. That's one reason why they are so powerful: we gun owners turn out in every election.

[DOR]

Doktor,

I haven’t seen a comprehensive voter registration list (one of the joys of state sovereignty: not much gets compiled nationally unless it's related to money), but I image one could get the data from each state secretary of state. I found Colorado, which listed 3.5 million registered voters in 2012, and according to my source above, the turnout that year was 74.4%. California over the past 25 years runs 70-75% in presidential years.

== = = = =

citanon,

I found the the statewide California election results, June 1990 – June 2016, in the first place I looked (http://vote.sos.ca.gov/; ballot measures are here: http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/ballot-measures/).

[DOR]

Anyone Understand This?

I know elections aren't about single issues, but this issue is all over the place.

[GVChamp]

DOR,

Is there a study of the turnout of registered voters? By my guestimate it'd be over 80% on federal level, but what about states?

Other WABbers,

Do you guys think above 80% of registered is OK? Why bother registering and then not showing up?

A friend of mine usually says that his vote is worth for 2 votes of those who didn't show up (here we have 60-70% (of all voters) turnout on parliamentary and local elections and about 50-ish on presidential and people say it is a low turnout.

If people don't want to vote, they don't want to vote. It doesn't help anyone to sit on a high horse lecturing people, especially since I'm not exactly a model citizen. It's not like I am leading protests, contacting Congresspersons, etc. I vote and I post stuff on the internet.

There's always local issues to care about as well. In IL, Madigan (D) no longer has his supermajority in both IL houses. We also passed a law essentially preventing local governments from raiding the road fund. Our Senate race wasn't competitive, but there were a lot of Senate races that could have made a difference even when the Presidential contest was already decided.

There is a death of local politics: politics is becoming more national. There were no states that split their presidential/senate vote this year, which apparently is a first in US politics (quoting 538 from memory, so this might be slightly off).

[Albany Rifles]

I don't know if your "area" goes out as far as the Valley. Out there, around Winchester, hundreds of migrants workers from Mexico have been coming in for years to pick apples. The big growers built barracks for them complete with a central kitchen where they could cook their meals. Growers have tried to hire locals but they've never had much luck.

Actually I am talking SE Virginia. But, yes, I have seen plenty of migrants in the Valley when I tour battlefields there. They are also big in the vineyard industry. My son had a 3 week summer job last year at one to help plant a new vineyard. He said the migrant workers put him to shame. He said he was busting hump 9 - 10 our days (and I know he is one hell of a good worker) but the migrant workers left him in the dust.

[DOR]

Maybe this one is easier to read; the voter turnout was just a distraction.

Alphabetical; the shortest blue in the center is New Hampshire (2.8%). Further to the right, the two shortest red states are North Dakota (3%) and South Dakota (2.8%).

The high outliers are (from left), Alaska (6.8%), DC (6.1%), Louisana (6.3%), New Mexico (6.7%) and West Virginia (6%). Of those, DC is the only blue.

[Albany Rifles]

I work the design end (not architectural though) often times its intentional ignorance.... I know a contractor who owns a pretty nice boat... he named it 'Change Order'....

I just about snorted water out my nose!!!

[astralis]

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politi...n-popular-vote

Democrats won the most votes in the election. They should act like it.

Democrats need to be an opposition party, not a minority party.
Updated by Ezra Klein@ezraklein Nov 22, 2016, 9:50am EST

More Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump. More Americans voted for Democratic Senate candidates than for Republican Senate candidates. And while we don’t have final numbers yet, it looks likely that more Americans will have voted for House Democrats than for House Republicans.

So why aren’t Democrats acting like it? Why aren’t they trying to force Republicans, the media, and the emergent Trump White House to act like it?

This is not an argument that the election was rigged, or that Trump’s win is somehow illegitimate. The president is chosen by the Electoral College. The Senate is built to favor small states. Gerrymandering is legal. America does not decide national elections by simply tallying up votes.

But the will of the voters still matters, or at least it should. Thus far, Democrats have slipped comfortably into the position of minority party. They aren’t demanding that Trump put forward compromise candidates for key posts. They aren’t laying out a proactive agenda that would serve as their basis for negotiations with Trump and the Republicans. And they aren’t, in their public messaging, emphasizing that most voters opposed Trump’s agenda, and that both Democrats and Republicans need to take that seriously.

Democrats have confused the reality of being out of power with the idea of being in the minority. This lets the Trump administration and the Republican Party confuse the reality of being in power with the idea of having a mandate for their agenda.

As grim as the situation is for Democrats — and it is grim — it’s not going to take long for Republicans to recognize their peril. They’ve lost the popular vote in six of the past seven elections. Their president-elect is less popular than any incoming president in the history of polling. It’s the out-of-power party that tends to gain in midterm elections.

If Trump were wise, he would govern with some humility. The question he faces is how to turn his minority into a majority. The answer is to reach out to the majority of Americans who didn’t vote for him and don’t approve of him — to show them, in word and deed, that they were wrong about him.

But that’s not going to happen. In his every move since winning the election, Trump has shown he’ll govern as the most extreme version of himself. So far, he has made Breitbart’s Steve Bannon his chief strategist, RNC Chair Reince Priebus his chief of staff, and retired Gen. Michael Flynn his national security adviser, and announced that Sen. Jeff Sessions will be his attorney general.

So far, there’s been no effort, at all, to reach out to the other side, or to play against type. There’s been nothing akin to Barack Obama’s announcement, which came this very week in 2008, that he intended to retain George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates.

All of which leaves an opening for Democrats. If Trump doesn’t intend to represent the majority of the country, then they can. They don’t hold much power in Congress, but they hold more than Republicans did in 2009, and Republicans were able to cause plenty of problems for Obama’s agenda.

Democrats should insist, in both appointments and legislation, that Trump govern with some consideration for the majority of Americans who voted for someone else. That should be the cost for their cooperation. Democrats should force both the media and Republicans to take seriously the fact that Trump is governing without a majority, or even a plurality, of the American people behind him, and that that carries with it a responsibility to govern modestly.

This is nothing more, and nothing less, than asking Trump to absorb the weight of the office he holds, and the message of the election he won. Trump is now president of the entire United States of America, not just the people who voted for him, and he needs to act that way. It’s the opposition party’s duty to remind him of that.

So far, there’s been little evidence that the media, the Democrats, or the Republicans really appreciate this. The media is still trying to understand how Trump won. Democrats are still trying to understand how Clinton lost. And Republicans are thrilled that they’re now in power. Everyone is so shocked by the election’s unexpected outcome that they’ve overlooked the actual results.

There’s been a lot of talk about “normalizing” Trump, but this is more fundamental: To ignore the election results and act like the strongest possible version of Trump’s agenda was endorsed by most voters re-historicizes Trump. It makes the election into something it wasn’t, and gives Trump license to govern in a way he shouldn’t.

Elections decide who wins power. They don’t decide how it should be wielded. If Trump governs in a way that respects the center of opinion in the country — a center Democrats appear to hold — Democrats should work with him. If he isn’t, then they should keep pointing that out, and force him to govern alone. They owe their voters nothing less.

[bfng3569]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...-in-34-states/

California breaks the electoral scale: It still has more votes to count than were cast in 34 states

YouGov's Will Jordan made an interesting observation over the weekend: California, the nation's largest state and home to 12 percent of its population, still has more ballots to count than were cast in 34 states and Washington, D.C.

Unsurprisingly, California is already recording more votes cast than any other state, according to U.S. Election Atlas. But the 2.8 million ballots left to count are more than were cast in Wyoming, Alaska, D.C., Vermont, the Dakotas, Hawaii and Delaware combined. Not all will be valid ballots, but most should be, further extending Hillary Clinton's 1.7 million-vote lead in the national popular vote.

Because of how the electoral college is structured, even small states get a minimum number of electors (just as they get a minimum number of senators and representatives). The lowest-population and lowest-vote-tally states — such as Wyoming and Alaska — end up getting more electors-per-voter than does a place like California. This leads to the perception that the electoral college is hopelessly tilted toward those smaller states.

Interestingly, though, that's not really the case. California is in about the middle of the pack in terms of the number of electors each voter is worth. If all 2.8 million of those ballots are determined to be valid, though, the state will sink into the lower third.

But notice how evenly distributed those red and blue bars are in either of those columns. Donald Trump won a lot of states where the voters are underrepresented in the electoral college, just as he won a lot where the voters are overrepresented.

In fact, on average across states, places where Trump won had slightly fewer electors per voter than did Clinton states. On average, voters in states Clinton won were worth 5.28-millionths of an elector. (In other words, for every million voters, the state got 5.28 electors in the electoral college.) In states Trump won, the voters were worth 5.14-millionths — meaning they were slightly undervalued. (This is all assuming that Trump holds Michigan.)

But there are two big caveats to that. The first is that all of the electors in every state won by one of the candidates went to that elector. (Save one elector in Maine.) That means that Clinton voters in places like Michigan — which was essentially a tie — got no electors representing their vote, just as Trump voters in California got none representing theirs. The second is that California alone receiving a below-average number of electors per voter means that millions of voters are underrepresented, as opposed to, say, Iowa, where the voters are more underrepresented — but there are far fewer of them.

The core dynamic of the election was that Clinton won her states big and Trump won his narrowly. That's why the House is Republican, too: Democrats winning huge margins in many districts while Republicans win more narrow victories and the majority. Overall, Trump votes were worth 4.94-millionths of an elector apiece, compared to 3.65-millionths for each Clinton voter.

That's the hard-to-reconcile problem. As many Trump supporters have pointed out, removing California from the equation brings things into balance: Trump wins the popular vote and the electoral college. Things don't get much more equal, mind you, but at least the top-line results are more in line.

The only problem with that plan, of course, is that California exists.

unfortunately the charts didn't paste.....

[Parihaka]

IIRC correctly from staring at the maps on the night, two states allocate their EC votes proportionally. Why not do that with California?