Iowans Among Most Active Voters in U.S.: Census Bureau Breaks Down 2012 Election Turnout By Gender and Race

Iowa often gets questions about why the presidential election process should start here with the first in the nation Iowa Caucus.

One reason could be that Iowans are among the most active voters in the country.

A new report by the U.S. Census Bureau shows that 69.4 percent of eligible Iowans voted in the 2012 election, in which Barack Obama earned a second term in the White House.

That percentage was one of the highest in the nation, according to new information released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Wednesday. Only eligible voters in Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Mississippi and Massachusetts had higher participation.

Mississippi had the highest voter turnout at 74.5 percent, and West Virginia the lowest at 47.8 percent.

A key point of the information released was looking at voter participation by race and gender. Among eligible voters in Iowa, 71.1 percent of women and 67.6 percent of men voted, and 70.7 percent of whites voted.

The map above shows the percentage of eligible US Citizens who voted in the November 2012 election in each state. Darker green states had a higher percentage of turnout. If you click on an individual state, you will see percentages of eligible US citizens who voted in that state broken down by gender, race and ethnic group. This information was released from from the US Census Bureau on Wednesday. Some demographic populations of eligible U.S citizen voters were less than 75,000 and too small to make a measure. We labeled them as "Too small to determine a measure."

Unfortunately, minority populations in Iowa are too small to be counted in the report.

Nationally, the data shows that eligible black voters participated at a higher rate than non-Hispanic white voters for the first time since the Census Bureau started publishing statistics.

About two in three eligible blacks (66.2 percent) voted in the 2012 presidential election, higher than the 64.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites who did so, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released today. This marks the first time that blacks have voted at a higher rate than whites since the Census Bureau started publishing statistics on voting by the eligible citizen population in 1996.

These findings come from The Diversifying Electorate -- Voting Rates by Race and Hispanic Origin in 2012 (and Other Recent Elections), which provides analysis of the likelihood of voting by demographic factors, such as race, Hispanic origin, sex, age and geography (specifically, census divisions). The report draws upon data from the November 2012 Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement and looks at presidential elections back to 1996. Using the race definitions from 1968 and the total voting-age population, whites voted at higher rates than blacks in every presidential election between 1968, when the Census Bureau began publishing voting data by race, and 1992.

 

Blacks were the only race or ethnic group to show a significant increase between the 2008 and 2012 elections in the likelihood of voting (from 64.7 percent to 66.2 percent). The 2012 increase in voting among blacks continues what has been a long-term trend: since 1996, turnout rates have risen 13 percentage points to the highest levels of any recent presidential election. In contrast, after reaching a high in 2004, non-Hispanic white voting rates have dropped in two consecutive elections. Between 2008 and 2012, rates for non-Hispanic whites dropped from 66.1 percent to 64.1 percent. As recently as 1996, blacks had turnout rates 8 percentage points lower than non-Hispanic whites.

Overall, the percentage of eligible citizens who voted declined from 63.6 percent in 2008 to 61.8 percent in 2012.