When the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago—Roe being the historic 1973 case establishing a constitutional right to abortion in America—voter turnout among women had been rising for years. But now the partisan gap between men and women started widening, to a chasm—especially in states where there’d been constitutional referendums on the abortion issue. In Michigan, which had such a referendum in 2022, Kamala Harris leads the women’s vote by 28 points over Donald Trump; and in Arizona, which has one scheduled for November, Harris leads Trump by 26 points.
Not unusually, U.S. journalists have been trying to predict what numbers like these mean for the presidential election in November. But the “predictive style in American journalism,” as the Signal contributor James Fallows has referred to it, has reliably come up short. In 2022, it assumed a “red wave” of Republican victories that never materialized. Before that, in 2016, it failed to anticipate a Trump victory that did. This isn’t just because polling is complicated—in ways journalistic narratives often aren’t; it's also because voter turnout—the question of what groups of people end up casting ballots in U.S. elections—keeps shifting in unpredictable ways. This November, women might indeed turn out in record numbers—or not. So, what can we know about turnout at all?
Jan Leighley is a professor of government at American University in Washington, D.C. Leighley says, in some ways, the profile of American voters has been stable for a long time: Wealthier and more educated people consistently vote at high rates, for instance. But there have also been changes to the profile in recent years: Not only has the electorate been getting more female, for example; it’s been getting older and less white. And yet, while the number of Latinos in America has grown, the proportion of Latinos in America who vote has historically been low—though that too could be changing in ways that won't be visible until after the election. Voting patterns, Leighley says, are far more complicated than what often comes across in the U.S. news media—not least because, while politicians care more about voters than nonvoters, most people don’t really care about politics …
Gustav Jönsson: To set a baseline—what’s typical in the profile of an American voter versus a non-voter?
David Todd McCarty
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