Votes cast set record though turnout doesn’t
Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008
Despite a record number of ballots cast in Tuesday’s election, voter turnout was notable more for who didn’t show than who did, said those who analyzed polling and data from the secretary of state’s office.
Jay Barth, a professor of politics at Hendrix College in Conway, said it appeared that early voting and new voter registrations in Arkansas weren’t “big enough to fundamentally shift” the state’s political makeup.
Voter turnout for the presidential election was about 64 percent and the number of votes totaled 1, 077, 530, according to the Associated Press. Tuesday’s turnout was the highest since 1996, the year former President Clinton was re-elected.
The tally was 22, 585 more votes than the 1, 054, 945 votes cast in the 2004 presidential election. Turnout was also slightly higher than in 2004, when 63 percent of voters cast ballots, according to the Associated Press, which hired stringers in each county to collect its data.
As of 5 p. m. Wednesday, numbers from the secretary of state’s office were incomplete with a reported 57 percent voter turnout. Three of the 75 counties — Desha, Scott and St. Francis — had yet to submit any turnout data, while many of the rest continued to count.
Secretary of State Charlie Daniels had projected a 65 percent to 70 percent turnout.
While still record-setting, the numbers reported Wednesday surprised many who expected an exceptionally high number of voters this year given the intense interest in the presidential election and the record number of voters who cast early ballots during the two weeks before Election Day.
Janine Parry, associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas, said she thought the projection by the secretary of state was optimistic, “but I didn’t expect it to be as low as it appears to be.”
According to the secretary of state’s office, 131, 641 people registered to vote in 2008 — 39 percent of those were people ages 18 to 24 and 33 percent were ages 25 to 44.
Pulaski County saw the largest number of potential new voters, with about 22, 000 registered this year. Benton County’s registration was the next largest with about 11, 000.
Overall turnout could be lower than expected in part because neither presidential candidate spent much time in the state, Parry said. Both campaigns expected Arkansas to go for McCain.
“Most of the time when a state is considered a sure thing for a candidate, it’s a little harder to get people excited about turning out,” Parry said.
But that may not fully explain the lower turnout, she said.
“There are a lot of clues to suggest that a lot of white Democrats stayed home,” said Parry, who is also director of the Arkansas Poll, an annual survey conducted by the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
The poll, conducted in October, showed Arkansas had more than twice as many undecided voters than polls were finding nationally, she said, and Democrats were a disproportionate part of that group.
In addition, only about twothirds of people who identified themselves as Democrats supported Obama compared with 82 percent of Democrats who supported Democratic candidate John Kerry in October 2004.
“[Kerry ] obviously made some connections with Arkansas voters that Obama had not made in October,” she said.
Barth, who is a member of the Democratic Party of Arkansas’ executive committee, also said he was under the impression that a lot of Arkansas Democrats stayed home.
“Normally, while they are conservative Democrats, the Arkansas electorate has more Democrats in it,” Barth, said. “My sense is that white Democrats, a significant number of them, simply chose not to participate.”
“That left a more conservative, more Republican-leaning electorate,” he said. “I think that’s why McCain won.”
The state does not collect demographic information about Arkansas voters such as race and sex.
Barth and Parry said they believed there were many Democrats in the state who didn’t want to vote for McCain but who were uncomfortable voting for Obama, either because he’s black or because of hurt feelings over Hillary Clinton’s loss of the Democratic nomination.
Barth also said that Obama had difficulty connecting with rural voters and “Arkansas is pretty rural... I think that’s a hurdle he’s really going to need to get over in the years to come.”
Elizabeth Aymond, spokesman for the Arkansas Republican Party, rejected the idea that white Democrats, in particular, stayed home from the polls.
“I wouldn’t say that at all,” she said, although she did agree that the overall electorate appeared to lean more conservative than is traditional in Arkansas.
Her party received many calls from Democrats who said they planned to vote Republican this year. “I think some people just felt disenfranchised by the caucuses and the primaries, and they looked at their own conservative values and saw that... Barack Obama didn’t fit that,” she said.
Aymond also agreed that the Republican turnout helped local Republican candidates such as Sen. Gilbert Baker of Conway, who beat challenger Joe White by 3, 463 votes in Faulkner County in the most-expensive race in Arkansas legislative history.
The strong Republican factor may also have helped Ann Clemmer lock her race in Saline County for the Arkansas House of Representatives District 29 race.
“I think big support for Mc-Cain in that county helped carry the day for her,” Barth said.
Indeed, Aymond said the turnout was good all around for her party.
“We had a great evening for our state and local candidates,” Aymond said.
According to the secretary of state’s office, about 41 percent of the voters who cast early ballots ranged in age from 45 to 64; 26 percent of those who voted early were between 25 and 44; 25 percent were between 65 and 84; and 6 percent were between 18 and 24.
There were 379, 031 early votes cast.
Data on the age groups who cast votes on Tuesday was not immediately available from the secretary of state’s office.
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