I’ve often heard it said as a truism in American politics that “the poor don’t vote” or “the underclass does not vote,” but I’ve never seen any certified statistics to back that up. Is there any source out there that shows how voting turnout levels vary across income levels or other indicators of social class or socioeconomic status? Also, is there any source that shows how voting turnout levels vary across other demographic factors, such as age, ethnicity, religion, or region?
I don’t have the specifices but the general rule is the older, richer and whiter you are, the more likely you will vote.
I know everybody says that but I’m looking for hard proof with actual stats.
Nobody knows? I’ve done some Googling, found lots of sites that track voter turnout in America since 1924, but none of them break down the data by income, age, or ethnicity. Some break it down by state, but that’s all.
Maybe you can’t find good hard numbers because it is hard to get this type of info? They certainly can’t ask people their race or income when they show up to vote, or even when they register to vote. They could ask after the fact but they might run into accuracy problems with the data (people might be reluctant to tell a pollster they don’t vote, etc.). Just my WAG.
Well, there’s CNN’s exit poll data. Okay, you’ll have to do some of the legwork yourself, and find quantities of categories in which you’re interest to extrapolate from the exit poll data, but it’s good data. Well, it’s CNN… but it’s probably good anyway.
This webpage gives election results in Minnesota. You can drill down to any individual precinct, and the page gives the counts of registered voters and actual voters. So you can calculate a percentage that voted in that precinct.
Then you would have to find another site that gives data on some characteristic you choose (age, income level, race) broken down by geographic areas. (You will run into the problem that most of that data is for a census tract, and those lines often don’t match with city precinct lines.)
Then compute the turnout for specific precincts, and compare to the turnout for other precincts that are quite different on the characteristic (age, income, race) you are studying to see the difference. Repeat for the 8,000 some precincts in the state.
And of course, this not a actual comparison – you are comparing whole precincts which are mostly one thing (older, richer , whiter, etc.) vs. other whole precincts which are less of that thing. You couldn’t say ‘older people vote more than younger people’; you’d have to say ‘precincts of mostly old people vote more often than recincts of mostly young people’. Not quite the same.
And to be accurate, you’ld have to eliminate other reasons that might explain the difference (like one precinct is much more religious than the other, it was raining in one precinct and not in the other, etc.) It would be quite a lot of work to do this well.
I thought of another, better way, but it only works for age.
In Minnesota, the Secretary of State will sell you a copy of the voter file. That has the birthdate of each voter, and a record showing whether they showed up to vote in the last 10 elections or so.
You could process that data, and produce a graph showing, for each birthyear, x% of those people actually voted. That would give you some figures for voting by age group.
Note that this would only apply to registered voters; it tells nothing about non-registered (they wouldn’t even be on the file). Also, I don’t think the file is cleaned with death records. So people who die stay on the file until they haven’t voted for 5 years. Probably, more old people would die each year than young ones; that could skew your results a bit.
In the end, after a lot of work, you would find that older people vote more regularily than young people. But anyone in politics already knew that.
To add more detail to this, this is what the conventional wisdom says about voter turnout:
- old people vote more than young people.
- white people vote more than black people.
- rich/comfortable people vote more than poor people.
- home-owners vote more than renters.
- couples vote more than singles.
- parents vote more than non-parents.
- native-born people vote more than immigrants.
- stayers (at an address) vote more than frequent movers.
- jews vote more than christians.
- gays vote more than straights.
- employed people vote more than unemployed.
- union members vote more than non-unionized.
- rural people vote more than city people.
- land-line users vote more than cell phone users.
but
- women and men vote about as often.
(Though the trend seems to be moving toward women, and eventually they will vote more than men. Also, in some sub groups (blacks, poor people, renters) women already vote much more than men.)
All of this is even more true in Primaries, Special elections, and off-year elections.
Note that these are compared within groups. Thus, for example, a higher percentage of the jewish population votes than the christian population, but the jewish population is only 3-5% of the whole population. So this is a relatively small number. But in a very close election, small numbers of voters can be important.
I have personally never been broken down by income or sex, but it would be fun to try. Eventually, I guess we’ll all be broken down by age. 
Here’s a link that should keep you busy:
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/voting/p20-552.html
I suppose there are similar pages for other years. The US census website is about the size of a city library!