Georgia, with its long history of black voter suppression, has been ground zero for fights over voting rights laws for decades. The state has often seen stark disparities in turnout between white and non-white communities, with the latter typically voting at a much slower rate.
But not always: In the 2012 election, when Barack Obama won a second term in the White House, the turnout rate for black voters under 38 in Lowndes County—a Republican-leaning county in south Georgia—was actually four percentage points higher than the turnout of black voters under 38. rate for white voters of a similar age.
It turned out to be temporary. Turnout for younger white voters in Lowndes was 14 percentage points higher in 2020 than for Black voters of the same age, according to new research from Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO.
What happened in between? It’s impossible to say for sure because there are many variables, including the fact that Obama is no longer on the ballot.
But a growing body of evidence points to a pivotal 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, that overturned a core part of the Voting Rights Act. The court effectively struck down a provision that required counties and states with a history of racial discrimination in elections — including all of Georgia — to obtain permission from the Justice Department before changing voting laws or procedures.
The result was a slew of laws that imposed restrictions on voting, such as limiting voting by mail and adding voter identification requirements. (One new provision in Georgia, which prohibits most people from providing food and water to voters waiting in line within 50 yards 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 Supreme Court’s decision would lead to a resurgence of suppression of historically marginalized voters because local and state governments, many in the South, would no longer need federal permission to change voting laws and regulations. Two new studies support that theory.
This month, research from the Brennan Center found that the gap in turnout rates between white and nonwhite voters “grew nearly twice as fast in previously covered jurisdictions as in other parts of the country with similar demographic and socioeconomic profiles.”
In other words, the turnout gap tended to grow fastest in areas that lost federal control after 2013.
Podhorzer’s research analyzed turnout at the provincial level. He found that the growing disparity in racial turnout since the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby was felt most acutely by younger voters across the country.
These are trends that worry Democrats when it comes to areas like Lowndes, home to Valdosta State University, with more than 12,000 students.
Podhorzer discovered that older voters are more resistant to voting changes because they have developed a fixed voting behavior. But it is much more likely that younger or new voters will be discouraged or prevented from voting.
It is “a kind of generational replacement, with older and established voters maintaining their voting habits, while new restrictions hinder younger voters,” Podhorzer said in his report, which will be released this weekend.
In Bulloch County, Ga., Winston County, Miss., and Newberry County, S.C., the racial turnout gap among young voters grew 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 has never grown by more than 11 percentage points.
Emergence in 2024
The youth vote in November will be critical, especially for President Biden. He won 60 percent of voters under 30 in 2020, as exit polls show, an important part of his coalition. But the 2022 midterm elections saw that a downward trend in the youth vote, and young voters have expressed exasperation with the president heading into this year’s elections.
A caveat: Using turnout to assess the impact of changes in voting laws is an imperfect assessment at best because it does not take into account other motivating factors, such as close races or polarizing candidates. 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 goes against some conventional wisdom about recent changes in voting laws. Political experts have often argued that limiting access to mail-in voting or reducing the number of polling stations is likely to impact older voters, who are often less mobile.
But Bernard Fraga, a professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta, noted that seeing a wider racial turnout gap among young voters was “fairly consistent with the previous literature on who should be most affected by these types of laws.”
“For populations that have historically been disenfranchised or less likely to vote, small changes in voting bills can have a much larger impact,” Fraga said, “because they are less resilient to this type of oppression. ”
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