How many dead people can’t vote?
by Tom Sullivan
Turning the dead people voting meme on its head, Daniel McGraw crunched some numbers on a Politico napkin to take a swag at how many voters will die off before the 2016 presidential election:
“I’ve never seen anyone doing any studies on how many dead people can’t vote,” laughs William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in demographic studies. “I’ve seen studies on how many dead people do vote. The old Daley Administration in Chicago was very good at that.”
Maybe soon it will be Republican zombies headed down to the DMV (Dead Men Voting) office to obtain their photo IDs. It turns out that mortality rates are more of a problem for Republicans than for Democrats. (And for Texans last weekend.) It’s not called the Grand Old Party for nothing:
By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, I calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. President Barack Obama’s voters, of course, will have died too—about 2.3 million of the 66 million who voted for the president won’t make it to 2016 either. That leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats.
Next come the caveats, of course, and there are lots of them: where those voters live, whether they are in swing states or not, turnout rates, etc. But adding in 6 million new youth registrations (recent exit polls put the split at about 65-35 D-to-R) puts Republicans at a nearly 2.5 million voter disadvantage going into 2016, McGraw estimates. Ruy Teixeira wrote last fall, “By the 2016 election, Millennials should be about 36 percent of eligible voters and roughly a third of actual voters.”
But to borrow a phrase, don’t be too proud of this demographical terror you’ve calculated. Counting young voters and getting them to turn out are two different things. Their staying home in 2010 (as in other mid-term elections) contributed to the Republican wave election that handed over so many state legislatures to GOP control. They stayed home again in 2014. Democrats got hammered, and not in a fun way.