African-American turnout was remarkably high in 2008, and that fact received considerable attention. The turnout of African-Americans in 2010 was notably lower, and African-American turnout declined more than white turnout did between 2008 and 2010. According to the Census Current Population Survey, African-American* citizens over the age of 18 were 4.6 percentage points less likely to vote than their white counterparts in 2010; in 2008, the gap had been less than one percentage point.

This analysis, however, doesn’t account for the fact that African-American potential voters tend to be situated differently from whites in ways that lower their turnout. For example, the average African-American adult citizen was 43.9 years old in 2010, while white adult citizens were considerably older at 48.3 years. 6.9 percent of African-American adult citizens were born outside of the United States, against just 3.7 percent of whites.

Since being young and foreign-born are both associated with lower turnout, a simple comparison of African-American and white voting rates is misleading. The charts below show that comparable populations of African-Americans and whites – 30- to 60-year-old citizens who were born in the United States – vote at much closer rates:

Source: Current Population Survey November Supplements 2000-2010, analyzed by CIRCLE

In 2010, U.S.-born African-Americans aged 30 to 60 were only 2.3 percentage points less likely to vote than their white counterparts, against a 4.6 point gap among all adult citizens.

This comparison only removes two factors – age and place of birth – out of the many that are associated with lower turnout. To take another example, African-American and white adults are not evenly geographically distributed. African-Americans are much more likely to live in places (like the South) that have low turnout rates, while whites are overrepresented in areas (like the upper Midwest) where turnout is high. That’s not just because African-Americans “drag down” turnout rates, either: the average African-American adult citizen lives in a state where white turnout is two percentage points below the national average. Start to take into account other factors that promote turnout – like education, income, and employment – and it becomes clear that the puzzle to be explained is not low turnout among African-Americans, but rather impressively high turnout.

-Andrew Mayersohn

*In this post, “African-American” and “white” refer to those who do not identify as Hispanic on the CPS.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 29th, 2011 at 9:50 am and is filed under CIRCLE Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.