Member-only story
Low Voter Turnout is the Biggest Threat to Democracy
If this weren’t the case, the GOP wouldn’t work so tirelessly to restrict voting access
If you tallied up all the nonvoters, they’d outnumber Trump supporters by a few million people.
In 2020, only 66.8% of the population above the age of 18 voted. Meaning a third of those eligible to cast a ballot chose to not partake in the presidential election at all.
The number of people over the age of 18 who voted for no one (33.2%) was greater than the percent that voted for Trump (31.3%) and almost the same as the number that voted for Biden (34.2%). The 2020 election had the highest turnout since 1952, but one-third of eligible voters still didn’t cast a ballot for either candidate.
In some states with a lower-than-average turnout, nonvoters were the real winners of the 2020 election. For example, in Texas, 40% of the population didn’t even cast a ballot and since Trump only won 51% of the vote (of the 60% who voted), he effectively only received 31% of the vote for the eligible voting population. This is a 9% margin between nonvoters (40%) and Trump voters (31%).
I’d hate to give Trump too much credit, but he was able to woo a lot of people who sat out during previous elections. But so did Biden.
