College-educated voters increasingly align with the Democratic Party, but simulations show that since 2016 Democratic Party no longer benefits from high voter turnout. Democrats would perform better in low-turnout elections, like local or primary, and Republicans in high-turnout general elections.
Abstract
Party realignment is occurring along the lines of education in the United States. As college-educated voters increasingly align with the Democratic Party, it is necessary to revisit the partisan effect of turnout. We predict that, since 2016, the Democratic Party no longer benefits from higher turnout. Using validated voter turnout from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), we simulate election results across turnout rates for the 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections. Our findings show that increases in turnout greatly benefit the Democratic Party in the pre-Trump era. However, this pattern has drastically changed. In 2016, 2018, and 2020, the Democratic Party sees a much smaller gain in vote share as simulated turnout increases, but also a large vote share advantage when voter turnout is extremely low. These results indicate that continued party realignment along the lines of education could lead to a persistent reversal in the expected partisan effect of turnout—where Democrats perform better in low-turnout local or primary elections and Republicans perform better in high-turnout general elections
The strangest thing to me about the “low voter turnout” screaming libs is their insistence that not wanting to vote is the fault of the voting public, rather than the parties. If they low voter turnout, it’s because they have nothing to offer the people. The dems could pretty easily win any election in a landslide just by promising the things they’ve danced around for the last two decades, any halfway decent political campaign could win over most of the country, but that would require actually promising things the people want.