• Cover Story
• Table of
  Contents
• Contents By
  Topic
• Columns
  • Brownstein
  • Cook
  • Crook
  • Powers
  • Rauch
  • Stokes
  • Schneider
  • Taylor Jr.
• Regular
  Features
  • Hotline Extra
  • Inside Washington
  • Insiders Poll
  • K Street Corridor
  • People
  • The Week on the Hill

Everyone expected an amazingly high voter turnout in last week's election. "It may be raining, lines may be long, but there will be record turnout," Barack Obama predicted the day before the election. Hillary Rodham Clinton warned voters: "You don't want to wait until the last minute. I think there will be an unprecedented turnout."

Was there?

Just over 208 million American citizens were eligible to vote this year. Edison Media Research estimates that more than 130 million people voted for president, either in person or by mail. That's 62.6 percent of all eligible voters.

That is 2 points higher than the 60.6 percent who turned out four years ago, according to a report by the Center for the Study of the American Electorate. The 2008 election continued a steady trend of higher voter turnout since 1996 (51.4 percent in 1996; 54.2 percent in 2000). But the 2008 figure is not exactly a quantum leap. In fact, it's slightly lower than the 64 percent of eligible voters who turned out in 1964 and the 67 percent in 1960.

The CSAE report explains what happened this way: "A downturn in the number and percentage of Republican voters going to the polls seemed to be the primary explanation for the lower-than-predicted turnout." According to CSAE Director Curtis Gans, "We failed to realize that the registration increase was driven by Democratic and independent registration, and that the long lines at the polls were mostly populated by Democrats."

According to the exit poll that Edison Media Research conducted for major news organizations, the African-American share of the vote did go up slightly, from 11 percent in 2004 to 13 percent in 2008. The white share declined a few points (77 percent in 2004; 74 percent in 2008). The Latino share of the vote stayed the same (8 percent).

The much-anticipated surge of young voters was not so much a surge in turnout as a surge in support for Obama. Americans under 30 made up 17 percent of the voters in 2004 and 18 percent in 2008. What changed was the Democratic share of the vote among younger voters: 66 percent, up from 54 percent in 2004.

The biggest shift in turnout was by party. Republicans dropped from 37 percent of voters in 2004 to 32 percent this year. Democrats increased from 37 percent to 40 percent. Independents went up from 26 percent to 28 percent.

A movement is under way in Congress to create universal voter registration, which would require the government to keep up-to-date voter lists. "A system of automatic registration in which the government bears more of the responsibility for assembling accurate and secure lists of eligible voters is a necessary reform," Clinton said last week. The United States is the only major democracy that requires citizens to register to vote on their own initiative. Turnout of registered voters is nearly as high in the United States as in most other industrial democracies (70 percent this year). But a lot of Americans don't bother to register or to keep their registration up to date.

Something else failed to happen this year -- the "Bradley effect," where voters tell pollsters they intend to support an African-American candidate but don't. There is no evidence that people were lying to pollsters.

Pre-election polls were remarkably accurate. The CNN/Opinion Research poll taken shortly before the election, for example, showed Obama getting 53 percent of the vote and John McCain 46 percent. That is exactly what they received. The CNN/Time pre-election poll, also conducted by Opinion Research, showed Obama winning Florida, the biggest battleground state, by 4 points. Obama won Florida by 3. The pre-election poll predicted that Obama would carry Ohio by 4 points. He did.

About one in five voters said that race was a factor in their vote. Among them, Obama led McCain by 8 points. Obama led by 5 points among the rest of the electorate. So, the Democrat's race turned out to be a net plus for him.