If you look at the voter turnout data for all the Presidential elections that have taken place since 2000, you will notice a few interesting things.
In all of these past six elections, turnout in blue states has been a good bit larger than in red states. electproject.org/home/voter-tur…
Turnout, the percentage of the people who are eligible to vote who actually vote, is smaller in red states than it is in blue states. Consistently.
In all but one of the last six elections (all but 2004), at least seven of the ten states with the highest turnout were blue states.
And in all but one of the last six elections (all but 2012), at least eight of the ten states with the lowest turnout were red states.
The states that have had the highest average ranking for turnout in Presidential Elections since 2000:
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maine, New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Michigan and Vermont.
The states with the lowest:
Hawaii, West Virginia, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Arizona, South Carolina, Indiana and New Mexico.
So, red states, on average, have lower turnout than blue states. All the time. In every election since at least 2000.
Question: if turnout were higher in some red states, would they still be red states? Or would they become blue states?
A total of only 15 states have gone both blue and red since 2000.
A few of these states have an interesting pattern when it comes to turnout rate and when they flipped from red to blue.
Arizona turnout
2000 - 45.6% - RED
2004 - 54.1% - RED
2008 - 57.7% - RED
2012 - 52.6% - RED
2016 - 54.9% - RED
2020 - 65.2% - BLUE
In 2000, Arizona was ranked 48th in turnout. As it moved up to 44th in 2012 and 43rd in 2016, the margin got tighter. In 2020, it flipped.
Colorado turnout:
2000 - 57.5% - RED
2004 - 66.7% - RED
2008 - 71.0% - BLUE
2012 - 69.9% - BLUE
2016 - 70.0% - BLUE
2020 - 75.5% - BLUE
The state flipped after the turnout exceeded 66.7%.
Georgia turnout:
2000 - 45.8% - RED
2004 - 56.2% - RED
2008 - 62.5% - RED
2012 - 59.0% - RED
2016 - 59.1% - RED
2020 - 67.7% - BLUE
I haven’t yet charted turnout vs margin but am going to do it. Here’s a chart of the margins over the years in AZ and GA.
Nevada turnout:
2000 - 45.2% - RED
2004 - 55.3% - RED
2008 - 57.0% - BLUE
2012 - 56.4% - BLUE
2016 - 57.4% - BLUE
2020 - 65.2% - BLUE
New Hampshire turnout:
2000 - 63.9% - RED
2004 - 70.9% - BLUE
2008 - 71.7% - BLUE
2012 - 70.2% - BLUE
2016 - 71.4% - BLUE
2020 - 74.7% - BLUE
Virginia turnout:
2000 - 54.0% - RED
2004 - 60.6% - RED
2008 - 67.0% - BLUE
2012 - 66.1% - BLUE
2016 - 66.1% - BLUE
2020 - 72.0% - BLUE
These states all have something in common. At some point in time, they flipped from one party to another. And the time they flipped coincided with the turnout for the state exceeding a certain threshold.
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There are a bunch of states that, if you compare the turnout rates during Presidential Elections and the GOP's margins for Presidential Elections over the last 4 to 5 elections, have an odd quirk.
They always move in the opposite directions.
In other words, in these states, the higher the turnout, the worse the GOP does. And the lower the turnout, the better the GOP does.
There are 3 states that have followed this pattern since 2004 and another 6 that have followed it since 2008.
All but one of these 9 states has a population that is at least 10% black, 10% latino or both. The one exception is the state of Montana, which also follows this pattern. The more people have voted, the worse the GOP has done during Presidential elections and visa versa.
The reason the @GOP wants to make it harder for people to vote is because the higher the turnout, generally, the more likely it is that a state goes blue.
And the Republican Party seems to have given up on winning elections by attempting to appeal to the electorate at large. The party has won three out of the past eight Presidential elections. But two of those three came despite losing the popular vote.
That’s now their goal.
They seem to think that their only path to victory is to win the electoral vote while losing the popular vote (and thus not even trying to appeal to the masses of voters). And to do that, to win these narrow electoral victories, they need to suppress turnout.
On average, a higher percentage of the population voted in blue states than in red states. And the growth in the percentage of voters who voted in 2020 blue states was higher than the growth in 2020 red states when you compare the states against their turnout rates in 2016.
Also, 8 of the 10 states with the lowest growth in turnout rates comparing 2016 and 2020 were red states (North Dakota, Louisiana, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Wyoming). Two were red states (New Hampshire and Maine).
One year ago, in February, 2020, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 158.7 million Americans were employed.
In February, 2021, the number of employed Americans is down to 150.2 million.
(Source: bls.gov)
And if you total all the monthly jobs reports from last March through the one that was released yesterday, even with the recent gains, America has lost 6.11 million jobs in the last 12 months.
That's a lot of money out of households.
A lot of small businesses struggling to survive. Or not surviving.
I hate debt and I hate spending. I hate incurring it myself and I hate it when the government incurs it.
But I also hate hypocrisy.
When Trump came to office, the National Debt was $19.95 trillion.
When he left, it was $27.76 trillion.
$7.81 trillion. And the GOP said NOTHING
We're in a pandemic now. America has about 2.5 million fewer jobs today than we had four years ago. That missing money has put a lot of people in financial jeopardy. The tax revenue lost by government and the toll on businesses has been staggering. Many are barely surviving.
That $7.8 trillion dollars in additional debt that America incurred during the Presidency of Donald Trump, which the GOP members of Congress had no problem with whatsoever based on their public comments, is more than four times the cost of the COVID bill. @HouseGOP@SenateGOP