Well, Fitzmas is past. Miers is history. Bush’s next SCOTUS pick won’t be known til next week. For the first time in ages, I don’t have a big day-job or moonlighting weekend project. My wife’s out of town on business. My kid’s away at college. Fall has finally arrived. The day is cool, crisp and windy, what I used to think of in my student days as Nietzsche Weather, when you want to go find an abyss to laugh over.In sum, it is, as Chris Schenkel used to always say, a Fine Day for Football. So in a few hours, I’ll try to find something red and black to wear, and mosey over to the local sports bar to watch the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, Georgia versus Florida. Now to yankees and other outsiders, this rivalry probably sounds like the Bud Bowl or something–a drinking contest between two party schools.But it’s a serious thing down there, made more vicious, oddly enough, by the rivalry’s recent pattern of total domination by one team or the other.Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Georgia routinely won, often coming from behind to rout the Gators in the second half. At one point in early 80s, I watched the game with a work colleague who had gone to Florida. As the third quarter ended, Florida had a small lead, but Georgia had begun one of those soul-crushing long ball-control drives that were the hallmark of the Vince Dooley era, and my friend got up and turned off the television. “Don’t you want to watch the fourth quarter?” I asked. “I’ve been watching this fourth quarter for fifteen years,” he wearily replied. Sure enough, Georgia won. In the 90s, with the return to Gainesville of The Evil Genius (a.k.a., the Ball Coach, Steve Spurrier), Florida dominated the series, especially during the tenure in Athens of Spurrier’s polar opposite, the honorable but less-than-cerebral good-ol-boy Ray Goff (“If Georgia had to hire a Danny-Ford-type coach, they should have hired Danny Ford,” quoth one Dawg Fanatic friend of mine). With both universities beginning to establish themselves as regional academic powers, the intellectual gap on the football field was painful for Georgia fans.Now both teams have Genius coaches. Georgia is undefeated, but its quarterback and moral leader, D.J. Shockley, will miss the game with a sprained knee. If Georgia wins, the post-game assessments will write themselves, because Shockley’s replacement is a third-generation Dawg named Joe Tereshinski III, whose major role in his two previous years in Athens was as long snapper on punts. Either way, it ought to be fun. For once, Georgia is playing in the day’s marquee game. I won’t have to beg Mike the Bartender to find an obscure screen on which to watch my team. I can make barking noises on kickoffs without pretending to undergo a coughing fit. Yes, it’s a fine day for football.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 22: Voters May Be Alienated, But They’re Still Engaged
There were a number of interesting takeaways from the latest detailed 2024 election analysis, but I focused on the very big picture at New York:
Researchers are just now gaining access to complete data on what actually happened in the 2024 elections via voter files and Census materials.
The progressive data firm Catalist just issued its report on 2024, and much of what it tells us is a familiar story by now:
“Overall, we find that the Democratic Kamala Harris / Tim Walz ticket retained key parts of the Biden 2020 coalition, but at lower levels among a specific, interconnected set of subgroups, including young voters, men, voters of color, less frequent voters, urban voters, and voters living outside the major battleground states. No single demographic characteristic explains all the dynamics of the election; rather we find that the election is best explained as a combination of related factors. Importantly, an overarching connection among these groups is that they are less likely to have cast ballots in previous elections and are generally less engaged in the political process.
“While these groups tilted toward Donald Trump and JD Vance, Harris retained support among more consistent voters, particularly in battleground states. Together, these dynamics allowed the Trump / Vance ticket to secure a narrow popular vote plurality and a sweep of the major swing states.”
The details, of course, are still interesting, particularly when Catalist gets down into the demographic weeds:
“Over the past several general elections, Democratic support has continued to erode among voters of color. Drops from 2020 to 2024 were highest among Latino voters (9 points in support), lowest among Black voters (3 points), and 4 points for Asian and Pacific Islander groups (AAPI) … As with other demographic groups, support drops were concentrated among the younger cohorts of voters, particularly young men. For instance, support among young Black men dropped from 85% to 75% and support among young Latino men dropped from 63% to 47%.”
But sometimes important data points emerge only when you look at them from 30,000 feet. Given all that we know about the erosion of public trust in institutions, steadily negative perceptions of the direction of the country, a long-term trend away from partisan self-identification, and the savage and alienating tone of contemporary political discourse, you’d guess that voter participation would be sliding into a deep ditch. But it isn’t:
“The 2024 election was a continuation of incredibly high turnout following Trump’s surprising victory in 2016, particularly in the battleground states. Since the start of Trump’s first term, voters have remained highly engaged in the political process.
“According to data from the United States Election Lab compiled by University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald … voter turnout spiked from 60% in 2016 to 66% in 2020 — the highest voter turnout in over a century, higher than any election since women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights era. Turnout dropped to 64% in 2024, but this drop was concentrated in non-competitive states, with some battleground states exceeding their 2020 turnout.”
So in a country where so many citizens seem to hate politics, voting is occurring (in relative terms) at historically high levels. Catalist doesn’t go into the possible explanations, but three come to mind right away.
First, despite recent Republican efforts to go back to a system dominated by in-person voting on Election Day, convenience-voting opportunities have steadily spread with voting by mail and/or in-person early voting available nearly everywhere, increasingly without conditions. In most jurisdictions, registering to vote has gotten easier in the 21st century, though, again, recent Republican initiatives to require documentary proof of citizenship and promote frequent “purges” of voter rolls definitely threaten to reverse that trend.
Second, competitive elections tend to produce higher voter turnout, particularly at a time of partisan and ideological polarization, when the stakes associated with winning or losing are heightened. Six of the seven most recent presidential elections have been very close either in the popular vote or the Electoral College or both. Control of either the House (2006, 2010, 2018, and 2022) or Senate (2002, 2006, 2014, and 2020) has changed in every midterm election of the 21st century. This level of instability over such an extended period of time is unusual and arguably galvanizing.
Third, the amount of money going into voter mobilization and persuasion in national election cycles has been steadily rising. The campaign-finance tracking site OpenSecrets has shown that in inflation-adjusted dollars, total spending has nearly tripled between 2000 and 2024 in both presidential and midterm elections. 2020 was actually the most expensive election ever with $7.7 billion (again, in inflation-adjusted dollars) going into the Trump-Biden race and $10.6 billion devoted to congressional campaigns. The slightly lower number for 2024 may have been attributable to the incredibly intensive targeting of resources on the seven battleground states, where, overall, as Catalist showed, turnout actually went up a bit from 2020.
These three factors do not, of course, take into account the much-discussed possibility that Donald Trump and his radicalized party are responsible for excited or fearful hordes of Americans going to the polls. But while voting patterns in Trump-era midterms are a bit different from those in the presidential elections when his name has been on the ballot, turnout has been elevated in the midterms, too. Indeed, the leap from a national turnout rate of 37 percent in 2014 to 50 percent in 2018 (dropping only a bit to 46 percent in 2022) remains one of the largest and most astonishing jumps in voter engagement in living memory.
Will these patterns change when (presumably) Trump leaves the scene in 2028? Nobody knows. But the anecdotal impression that Americans have grown tired of politics, and even government, during the Trump years hasn’t translated into unwillingness to vote.