Why 2020 broke Conn. voter turnout records

This year will break records in Connecticut for voter turnout.

“It’s clear that it will exceed 2016’s turnout, which was the recent high water mark for turnout,” said Gabe Rosenberg, a spokesman for Denise Merrill, Connecticut’s secretary of the state.

The primary driver, according to Gayle Alberda, was passion. Early on in the extended campaign season, there were signs of heavy emotional engagement in the political process.

“Over 80 percent of the electorate was excited about the election and engaged,” said Alberda, an assistant professor of politics at Fairfield University. “It foreshadows that you’re going to have long lines and massive turnout when excitement is that high.”

The election was considered by many to be a referendum on President Donald Trump, and Alberda said “disenchantment with the current president” drove Democrats and independent voters to the polls.

The numbers may still be getting tallied and the results are still preliminary but, at the latest count, 1,823,122 votes were cast this year, 252,335 more than in 2016.

That’s about 80.5 percent of the total electorate, an increase of about 3.5 percent over four years ago.

Beyond excitement and engagement among both party loyalists and independents, sweeping demographic shifts contributed to the massive voter turnout, according to Ken Gronbach, a demographer and former Republican town chairman in Haddam.

“Millennials are the largest generation in history,” he said. “Millennials are going to drive the economy and millennials are going to drive elections. Wait ‘till the next election. They’re going to overpower it.”

‘ The leading edge’

It’s not just the fact of millennial voters, it’s that they have been aging.

Gronbach defined a millennial as someone between the ages of 16 and 35, which puts “the leading edge” of that generation, in a position to wield political power.

“Generally after age 27 we see that change, they become more actively engaged,” Alberda said. “The largest generation becomes your largest voting bloc. Elections in years prior they were in the younger cohort which we know doesn’t vote as frequently.”

That demographic shift might have helped Joe Biden, according to Gronbach: “When we’re young we tend to be more liberal.”

Gronbach suggested that, as the impact of the millennial voting bloc becomes more apparent, it could change how candidates attempt to relate to their constituencies.

“They’re buying houses everywhere. It’s going to drive economics overall,” he said. “The thing that changed everything is that the boomers are finally leaving the labor market.”

The minority vote

From a demographic perspective, turnout wasn’t just about age but race and ethnicity.

“Minority voter turnout was very large, both LatinX and Blacks,” Alberda said. “Which is a factor. The candidates really did have to court those groups. They really did have to put in the time and effort in courting those groups, which helped foster more turnout among those groups.”

This election was held, according to James Rawlings, amid the backdrop of a national Black Lives Matter movement and the violent reaction to it.

Rawlings, who works with the Connecticut chapter of the NAACP, said the role of minority voters was “determinative” nationwide.

“I think the vote was really more about the negativity and what happened with the polarization of America,” he said, calling much of the rhetoric “a real threat not only to current generations but to future generations.”

The election, he said, “was powerful. We understood that.”

Rawlings said Biden actively courted minority votes from the beginning, which made a difference in the likelihood that they would bear long lines and cold weather to cast a ballot.

“He’s not an interloper, asking for someone’s vote every two or four years,” Rawlings said of Biden. “He can count on the minority community and the minority community can count on him.”

But that doesn’t mean, Rawlings said, that Biden can expect the minority vote as fait accomplis.

“He’s a person that we have a high degree of confidence in,” Rawlings said. “The vote showed that we will continue to have confidence in him if he continues to be a partner with us.”

Ballot access

Of course, this election was held during a pandemic. Voters wearing masks stood in long lines across Connecticut, as across the country.

In response, Merrill sent absentee ballot applications to every single registered voter. In response, a record number of absentee ballots were returned, more than 650,000 in Connecticut.

“The pandemic allowed a lot of states to alter their election processes,” Alberda said. “Connecticut allowed for individuals to vote by absentee ballot, with basically no excuse. A lot of states just made it easier to do so.”

Merrill said after the election that the experience might change how elections are conducted in Connecticut regardless of the pandemic. She’s proposing an amendment to the state constitution to allow voters to cast absentee ballots without an excuse.

“As our local election officials are working hard to complete the counting of an historic number of absentee ballots, one result is absolutely clear – the voters of Connecticut want to be able to vote conveniently by absentee ballot without an excuse,” she said in a release. “The availability of absentee ballots allowed more than 650,000 people to safely and conveniently cast their ballots, and helped to drive what will ultimately be among the highest turnout elections in Connecticut history.”

This election may hold the record in Connecticut, but it may not for long, according to Alberda.

“The easier it is to access the ballot the higher the voter turnout,” she said.