Segmentation Fault: Core dumped..;-)

Let’s take a step back and look at some data. Shall we..

Posted : August 30, 2004 at 6:44 pm [America/Los_Angeles]

Presidential Elections (1968 to 2000)

Year	VAP	Registered	Actual Vote	% TO VAP	% TO REG	Who won?
1964	114,090,000	73,750,717	70,639,284	61.9%	95.8%	Lyndon Johnson (Democrat)
1968	120,328,186	81,660,740	73,199,998	60.8%	89.6%	Richard Nixon (Republican)
1972	140,776,000	97,338,541	77,744,027	55.2%	79.9%	Richard Nixon (Republican)
1976	152,309,190	105,134,692	81,531,584	53.5%	77.5%	Jimmy Carter (Democrat)
1980	164,597,000	113,068,956	86,509,678	52.6%	76.5%	Ronald Reagan (Republican)
1984	174,468,000	124,176,015	92,653,233	53.1%	74.6%	Ronald Reagan (Republican)
1988	182,630,000	126,325,257	91,594,686	50.2%	72.5%	George H.W. Bush (Republican)
1992	189,044,500	133,648,177	104,423,923	55.2%	78.1%	Bill Clinton (Democrat)
1996	196,501,001	145,085,478	96,275,401	49.0%	66.4%	Bill Clinton (Democrat)
2000	213,954,023	157,063,553	105,417,258	73.4%	67.1%	George W. Bush (Republican)
2004	223 million (approx.)	165 million (approx.)	132 million (approx.)	?	80% (approx.)	?

Before we start dissecting the data shown above, let’s get the terminology straight:

VAP - Voting Age Population (basically, Americans eligible to vote)

Registered - Registered voters

Actual Vote - Total number of voters who “actually” voted on the day of the election

% TO VAP - (Actual Vote/VAP)*100

% TO REG - (Actual Vote/Registered)*100

With that out of the way, let’s see what this table is really saying:

1. In 2000, almost 50 million registered voters did not vote on the day of the elections!

2. If you look at the data for 2004, I literally tried extrapolating the values for VAP and Registered Voters by looking at the trends of the previous elections. So, how did I come up with 132 million actual voters on Nov. 2nd, 2004? Well, if you look at 1964 and 1968, you will notice that given the right political climate (like JFK’s assassination or Vietnam war), registered American voters tend to exercise their voting rights in droves. A similar conclusion can be drawn upon looking at the data for the last 3 elections. Notice that the % TO REG value was highest in 1992 probably because Americans wanted to come out and vote for or against the first Iraq war and the sluggish economy.

9/11, Iraq war and the Economy (not to mention the deeply divided political climate of this country) leads me to believe that about 80% of the registered voters will come out on Nov. 2nd to vote! It might be a conservative estimate, but if we went with 80%, that would mean there will be a total of 132 million approx. Americans who would be voting this Fall. That is 27 million new voters compared to 2000. Considering that the previous election was decided on 537 votes only, there is ample lot of room for both Democrats and Republicans to dream!

As I had alluded to in the past, President Bush cannot win this election by banking on die-hard Republicans who have diligently voted for Republican candidates in the past. He will need spanking new “Republican” voters from this pool of 27-odd million and a majority of them to safely clear the hurdle of getting more “popular” and “electoral” vote this time around. As for Senator Kerry, all he can hope to achieve is to make sure that he can hold his ground against the continuing “negative” onslaughts that is bound to increase in the coming weeks and months leading up to the elections.

- Anand

Category: United (or not) State of American Politics 2004