2018: Who actually voted? (The real story, not the exit polls.)

Continuing from our earlier discussion . . . Yair posted some results from his MRP analysis of voter turnout:

1. The 2018 electorate was younger than in 2014, though not as young as exit polls suggest.

2. The 2018 electorate was also more diverse, with African American and Latinx communities surpassing their share of votes cast in 2014.

3. Voters in 2018 were more educated than all the years in our dataset going back to 2006. . . . the exit poll shows the opposite trend. As noted earlier, they substantially changed their weighting scheme on education levels, so these groups can’t be reliably compared across years in the exit poll.

Details here.

6 thoughts on “2018: Who actually voted? (The real story, not the exit polls.)

  1. ” 2018: Who actually voted? ”

    NY Times (9 Nov 2018) initially reports that the numerical majority of eligible American voters (Vote Eligible Population/VEP) did NOT vote at all last week, though there was record voter turnout for this mid-term election.

    What are the demographics of these non-voters?
    Seems there should be substantial political-science interest in the majority of the Electorate that did not vote…versus the minority that did vote.

  2. Yair wrote:
    “2. The 2018 electorate was also more diverse, with African American and Latinx communities surpassing their share of votes cast in 2014.”

    The word “Latinx” was entirely new to me and at first I thought it was a typo. But Wikipedia says:
    “Latinx (la-teen-ex) (/ləˈtiːnɛks, læ-/) is a gender-neutral term sometimes used in lieu of Latino or Latina (referencing Latin American cultural or racial identity). The plural is Latinxs.”

    I was unable to find the phonetic version for the plural form. But, from

    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-people-are-using-the-term-latinx_us_57753328e4b0cc0fa136a159

    there is a Google Trends graph which indicates that Latinx starts around 2004 with one entry and by October, 2018, it is up to 49.

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