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This year’s election carries enormous political stakes, but if history is any guide, the vast majority of eligible voters will stay home on Election Day. Slightly more than a third of eligible voters turned out across the country in the last midterm elections, the lowest share since 1942, according to Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida, who runs the United States Elections Project that tracks voting data back to 1789.
And while turnout has been higher in this season’s special elections and primaries, experts say that in November it is still unlikely to break out of the middling range it has been stuck in for nearly a century.
People typically cite one of two reasons for why they do not vote in midterm elections: they are either too busy or not interested, according to Dr. McDonald’s analysis of responses to the Census Bureau from 2000 to 2016.
“The costs of voting are not terribly high compared to the way they’ve been at times in American history,” said Benjamin Highton, a political scientist at the University of California at Davis, who has studied voter ID laws. “People simply have other things they are more interested in, like making ends meet on a day-to-day basis.”
