The missing piece from last night’s landslide Democratic Party wins, as always, will come in the next week or more, when we’ll begin to see statistics of nationwide registered voter turnout.
With more than 60 million early voting ballots cast, a record for a midterm election, it might just be the first time since 2018 that more than half of voting-eligible public cast ballots in a midterm election.
The numbers are not yet tallied, though. Some races haven’t even yet been called. Turnout numbers are generally ignored by all major media but a few election nerds like me. If they get coverage at all, its short-shrift. That’s a shame, because that’s where the real story of an election is.
Why? As Democrats finish their post-election orgasm cigarette today and drone breathlessly on about a ‘Blue Tsunami’ they pulled off last night, the turnout numbers will put an exact figure on how many people were energized enough to bother filling out a ballot. And the numbers are almost always dismally low.
Historically, 2018 was a high-water mark for voter turnout, attracting a tiny sliver more than 50 percent of eligible voters to the polls, at 50.1 percent. Voter turnout in the 2010, 2014 and 2022 midterm elections only reached a hair more than 46 percent in 2022 and low of 37 percent in 2014.
That means, in most midterm elections, the vast majority of eligible voters, up to 64 percent, chose ‘None of the Above.’ When politicians talk about getting people ‘off the sidelines’ and to the polls, they’re talking about the None of the Above crowd. But few of them actually talk about what is keeping them out of the electoral process. Some of the more progressive candidates in yesterday’s election may have begun to scratch the surface of that untapped potential. We’ll see.
To be fair, it does seem like a breakthrough election for turnout, if early voting is any indication. And it is. But any victory lap is at least premature.