Georgia, with its long history of suppressing black voters, has been ground zero for battles over voting rights laws for decades. The state has often seen stark differences in turnout between white and non-white communities, with the latter typically voting at a much lower rate.
But not always: In the 2012 election, when Barack Obama won a second term in the White House, turnout among black voters under the age of 38 in Lowndes County—a Republican-leaning county in southern Georgia—was actually four percentage points higher than the rate for white voters of a similar age.
It turned out to be temporary. According to new research by Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO, by 2020, turnout among younger white voters in Lowndes was 14 percentage points higher than for black voters of the same age.
What happened in between? It’s impossible to say for sure, with many variables, such as Obama no longer being on the ballot.
But a growing body of evidence points to a landmark 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, that struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act. The court effectively ended a provision that required counties and states with a history of racial discrimination at the polls — including all of Georgia — to get permission from the Justice Department before changing voting laws or procedures.
The result was a series of laws that included restrictions on voting, such as restricting voting by mail and adding voter ID requirements. (A new Georgia ordinance that restricts most people from providing food and water to voters waiting in line within 150 feet of a polling place was featured on a recent episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”)
Connecting the dots
For years, political scientists and civil rights leaders argued that the high court’s ruling would lead to a resurgence of historically marginalized voter suppression because local and state governments, many in the South, no longer needed federal permission to change election laws and regulations. Two new studies reinforce this theory.
This month, research from the Brennan Center found that the turnout gap between white and non-white voters “grew nearly twice as fast in formerly covered jurisdictions as in other parts of the country with similar demographic and socioeconomic profiles.”
In other words, the attendance gap tended to grow faster in areas that lost federal oversight after 2013.
Podhorzer’s study analyzed turnout at the county level. It found that the widening racial turnout gap after the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby was felt most acutely by younger voters across the country.
Those are the trends that worry Democrats when it comes to areas like Lowndes, home to Valdosta State University, with more than 12,000 students.
Podhorzer found that older voters are more resistant to voting changes because they have established voting habits. But younger or first-time voters are far more likely to be dissuaded or dissuaded from voting.
It is “a kind of generational replacement, where older and established voters maintain their voting habits, while new restrictions hinder younger voters,” Podhorzer said in his report, which will be published this weekend.
In Bulloch County, Ga., Winston County, Miss., and Newberry County, SC, the racial turnout gap among young voters increased by 20 percentage points or more between the 2012 and 2020 elections. In each of these counties, the gap for both Gen X and even older voters never widened more than 11 percentage points.
Participation in 2024
Youth vote turnout in November will be critical, especially for President Biden. He won 60 percent of voters under 30 in 2020, according to exit polls, a key part of his coalition. However, the 2022 midterm elections saw a downward trend in youth voting, and young voters have expressed their anger with the president heading into this year’s election.
A caveat: Using turnout to assess the impact of changes to election laws is an imperfect estimate, at best, because it fails to account for other motivating factors, such as close races or candidate polarization. It also ignores aspects of the cost of voting, such as the time it takes.
Seeing a more substantial racial turnout gap among young voters undercuts some conventional wisdom about recent changes to election laws. Political pundits have often argued that limiting access to postal voting or reducing the number of polling places is likely to affect older voters who are often less mobile.
But Bernard Fraga, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta, noted that seeing a larger racial turnout gap among young voters was “quite consistent with previous literature about who should be most affected by this kind of the laws”.
“For populations that have historically been disenfranchised or are less likely to turn out to vote, small changes in voting calculus can have a much larger impact,” Fraga said, “because they’re less resistant to this kind of suppression. “
Are you an undecided voter? We want to hear from you
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