Voter Turnout Up From 2006 Midterm
WASHINGTON (
) -- Americans seem to have been more eager to get out and vote on Tuesday than during the last midterm election, but nowhere near as enthusiastic as the 2008 election that swept President Obama into office.
A preliminary voter-turnout estimate provided by a professor at George Mason University shows that about 41.5% of eligible voters took to the polls on Tuesday. That's a 1.1 percentage-point bump from the last midterm election, but a 20.1-point bump from the last elections. The Obama race had boosted voter turnout to the highest level on record since the activist era of the late-1960s.
On a Web site for the United States Elections Project, Michael McDonald, the professor who collects the data for the U.S. Department of Public and International Affairs, warns that the figures are still preliminary estimates.
"Please be aware that these numbers will change as more information becomes available, and that we will not have a final word on the number of votes cast until states certify their election results in the coming month" writes McDonald.
The professor updated the numbers on Wednesday afternoon to revise figures for the "high-mail ballot states" of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington. Two Senate seats, in Alaska and Washington, are still being contested while 10 House seats across the country remain undecided.
According to McDonald's figures, some of the states with the highest increases in turnout from four years ago were those where incumbents were unseated - or nearly so - and where Republicans had some big wins.
In Louisiana where turnout rose the most -- by a whopping 9.5 percentage points -- Republicans won seven out of eight available seats. The only seat won by a Democrat was that of ousted Republican Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao. In Nevada, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid scraped by to victory, turnout appears to have risen 6.3 points.
Delaware, which showed the third-highest turnout gains of 6.8 points, arguably had the biggest upsets of all the races. Conservative Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell ousted incumbent Mike Castle in the primary election, then went through a grueling, mud-slinging pre-election battle. However, she didn't manage to beat Senator-elect Chris Coons and the Democrat who won nearly 57% of the vote.
The lowest turnout states offered the fewest surprises.
Perhaps least surprising was the area with the lowest turnout: Washington, D.C., which doesn't have elected officials with any voting power. Other states with low turnouts had reliable blue- or red-state results, too: Texas, Utah, New York, New Jersey.
Montana saw the country's highest drop in turnout, of 12.2 percentage points. But the low-population state had just one election - for the only House of Representatives seat it has, which went to incumbent Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg for his sixth election win.
"I'm feeling pretty confident, however you're never confident until 8 o'clock when the polls are closed," Rehberg told a local television on Tuesday afternoon.
-- Written by Lauren Tara LaCapra in New York
.
>To contact the writer of this article, click here:
Lauren Tara LaCapra
.
>To follow the writer on Twitter, go to
http://twitter.com/laurenlacapra
.
>To submit a news tip, send an email to:
.
Disclosure: TheStreet's editorial policy prohibits staff editors, reporters and analysts from holding positions in any individual stocks.
