Elections: Turnout in the 2004 Presidential Election

One of the major stories of the 2004 presidential election was the increase in voter turnout from 2000. There is no doubt that there was heightened interest in the 2004 campaign and that rates of voter participation increased most everywhere in the United States. All Americans should be pleased with this aspect of the contest between Bush and Kerry. Yet, this good news needs to be tempered once one puts political interest and turnout in 2004 into historical perspective. Journalists who wrote of "unprecedented interest" in the 2004 race for the White House were clearly exaggerating. And anyone who wrote of "record turnout" among voters could only justify such a claim by focusing on the sheer number of voters who cast ballots--not on the percentage of eligible persons. This research note presents a variety of data on these points in an attempt to place the 2004 participation results into clear perspective. Interest in the 2004 Presidential Campaign Few observers would question the assertion that public interest in the Bush-Kerry race was higher than was the case for the Bush-Gore race of 2000, and much higher than interest in the Clinton-Dole-Perot race of 1996. Yet, memories all too often seemed to be quite short in assessing public interest in the presidential campaign. Relatively little mention was made of the very high level of interest that the public expressed in the Clinton-Bush-Perot contest of 1992. Polls done by the Pew Center for People and the Press showed that interest in the 2004 campaign was roughly identical to what was found at comparable points in the 1992 campaign. For example, they found that 76 percent of registered voters interviewed in mid-October 2004 said they had given "a lot of thought" to the presidential election compared to 77 percent who responded this way in early October 1992. In mid-October 2004 a Pew Center poll found that 54 percent said they had been following news about the presidential election "very closely" and another 29 percent said "fairly closely." At roughly the same point in 1992, 55 percent responded "very closely" and 36 percent said "fairly closely." It is of course one thing to say you are interested in the campaign and quite another to actually do something which demonstrates interest. One measure for which good data exist over time is viewing presidential debates. These statistics are highly reliable because Nielsen Media Research compiles them based on devices attached to TVs in a random sample of households. With the transformation of political conventions into stage-managed coronations, live presidential debates have come to be the only moments of true spontaneity and drama in modern American campaigns. Just as interest in the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and other regular big events in American culture can be traced by rising and falling Nielsen ratings, so can interest in presidential campaigns via debate ratings. As shown in Table 1, like most other major events on television, the Nielsen data show declining ratings for viewing presidential debates since cable started to substantially fragment the viewing audience in the early 1980s. There have been two clear exceptions to the pattern of declining ratings for presidential debates during this period--1992 and 2004. Interestingly, in both cases the Nielsen ratings increased 19 percent from the level measured four years earlier. Thus, the increase in interest in the 2004 election--as measured by watching the major events of the campaign--was hardly unprecedented. Indeed, it was a virtual repeat of what occurred between 1988 and 1992. The major difference was that the typical audience for the presidential debates of 1992 was 43 percent of the population as compared to just 33 percent in 2004. Perhaps this decline was inevitable given the increased number of viewing options for Americans as the television environment has been transformed from broadcasting to narrowcasting. But in any event, it would be hard to argue from these numbers that interest in the 2004 campaign rose to an unprecedented level. …