A new study ranks the District of Columbia’s nearest neighbors, Maryland and Virginia, first and third on a list of “most politically engaged” states.
Looking at voter registration and turnout in recent elections, among other factors, the personal finance site WalletHub found political engagement to be highest in the Mid-Atlantic and Pacific Northwest regions. The analysis ranked New Jersey second behind Maryland, with Washington and Oregon claiming the fourth and fifth spots.
Landlocked states in the South and West populated the bottom of the list: Nebraska (46), South Dakota (47), Alabama (48), West Virginia (49) and Arkansas (50).
A record 155 million voters reached the polls in the 2020 election. “Unfortunately, that number still only accounts for 66.8 percent of the voting-age population,” Adam McCann writes in the new report. The 2018 midterms brought out “the highest turnout in decades, but still only 53.4 percent of all eligible voters voted.”
Rebecca Harris, a professor of politics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, said the rankings could reflect longstanding regional variations in political culture.
Voters in the Northeast and Upper Midwest “approach politics as their duty,” she said. “New England, with its history of town meetings, I think that ethic still carries through.” In the South, by contrast, “traditionally only elites are involved in politics. It isn’t the average citizen.”
Voter turnout in 2020 ran highest in New Jersey, Minnesota and Oregon, and lowest in Arkansas, West Virginia and Oklahoma.
A group of states at the Canadian border produced the highest turnout in 2018: Maine, Wisconsin, Montana, Minnesota, North Dakota and Washington. The lowest turnout came in Arkansas (again), Hawaii and West Virginia.
Overall voter registration in 2020 favored and disfavored many of the same states: New Jersey, Minnesota, Oregon and Maryland boasted the highest rates of registration, along with Mississippi, a state that ranked 40th in overall political engagement. Florida, a perennial swing-state in national elections, ranked 48th in registered voters.
The WalletHub analysis found that income and education track closely to political involvement. In the 2020 election, 85 percent of voters with family incomes above $150,000 turned out to the polls, compared to 47 percent of those with household incomes under $10,000.
Not surprisingly, West Virginia and Mississippi, states with lower average incomes, ranked at the bottom on another measure of engagement: political contributions per adult. Wealthy East Coast states of Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York ranked highest, surpassed only by Wyoming, one of the wealthiest Mountain states.
The ranking found that blue states tend to rank higher in political engagement than red states. Some experts predict the fall midterms could break that pattern.
“We have already seen voters in Kansas — especially newly registered women voters — turn out in large numbers to shoot down an anti-abortion referendum” in that red state, said Daniel Aldrich, a Northeastern University professor, in a Q&A attached to the new study.
“I think it is very likely that in red states which have previously seen relatively low voter turnout — Oklahoma, Arkansas, West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas — we are going to see higher turnout than in the past.”