Who Doesn’t Vote and Why
What drives some people to vote and others to stay home? The Pew Research center released a report on who votes, who does not, and tries to answer the question of why.
To summarize, they basically break adults into 4 categories, and then talk about each category:
Regular voters – The 35% of adults that ‘always’ vote.
Intermittent voters – The 20% of adults who are registered, but vote less regularly than Regular voters.
Registered but rare voters – The 23% of adults who rarely vote because most of the time (76%) they don’t think that they know enough about candidates issues to cast a ballot.
Unregistered adults – The 22% of the population who can’t/won’t vote because they are not registered or who’s registration has expired/lapsed.
There are a bunch stats, but the most telling to me [according to this research] are:
- Hispanic voters make up 40% of unregistered adults
- 18-29 year olds make up 40% of unregistered adults
- Republicans are more likely to be registered to vote than Democrats
- Non-voters are more like to distrust people in general than voters
What makes a conservative person more likely to participate by voting? I would think that the opposite would be true given that liberals generally support a more active government.
I can understand a non-voting person’s reluctance to trust a politician, but why do are these same people less likely to trust anyone?
Categories:
Voting
Politics
Republican
Democrat
Trust
