How does voter turnout drop-off for midterms?

It is a common refrain that voter turnout in midterm years doesn’t come close to presidential election years. While we await preliminary turnout numbers for tomorrow’s election, USAFacts has the data to help you compare midterm and presidential year voting habits across races, ages, and education levels dating back to 1996. 

• Reported voting fell from 64% in the 2008 presidential election to 46% in the 2010 midterm. From 2012 to 2014, it dropped from 62% to 42%.
   
• Since 1996, the smallest voter drop-off from presidential election to midterm was from 2016 to 2018, when turnout was high for a midterm election. 
   
• The demographic with the largest turnout drop between the 2016 and 2018 elections was younger voters without college degrees. Voters 65 or older with a doctorate or professional degree had the smallest drop: 2 percentage points.

Where do you fit into the data? Explore the numbers right here. 

What makes a swing state?

Some states swing between electing Democratic or Republican candidates from election to election. Because of their potential to be won by either candidate, political parties often spend a lot of time and campaign resources on winning these states. Recent presidential elections reveal how voters swing states — or keep them consistent for years.

• There’s no official definition for a swing state, but one measurement is whether a presidential candidate won the state by fewer than three points. From 1992 to 2020, 26 states were won by less than a three-point margin in at least one election. Florida and Nevada had tight margins in five of these eight elections. 

• Since 1988, 20 states have voted for the same party in every presidential election.
   
• Five states that switched from Donald Trump in 2016 to Joe Biden in 2020 — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — have gubernatorial elections this year. All but Michigan have Senate seats up for election as well.
   
• Of the past eight presidential elections, the 1992 election had the highest number of states switching political parties from the previous presidential election: 22. There hasn’t been a presidential election since with that many states voting for a different political party’s candidate.

Click here for more maps charting swing state data. 

Understanding loss of life at the US-Mexico border 

At least 8,000 undocumented migrants have died attempting to cross the border from Mexico to the US since 1998. However, there are conflicting sources on these deaths. Read this article to see how the government collects this data, plus discrepancies in determining who has perished. 

• According to Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), approximately 247 people died crossing the US-Mexico border in 2020. That’s the lowest total since at least 1998. The recent high was 492 people in 2005. 
   
• Information on the causes of migrant deaths is sparse, but drowning, extreme heat, smuggling operations, fall-related injuries, and interactions with CBP officials are some of the most commonly recorded. In June, 53 people smuggled over the border died after being abandoned in a tractor-trailer in southwest San Antonio.
   
• The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has criticized CBP’s reporting of border deaths, calling it incomplete. The GAO compared deaths recorded by the Tucson sector of the CBP to those by the Pima County medical examiner’s office and found that the medical examiner’s numbers were frequently more than twice as high than CBP’s. In 2019, the medical examiner counted 133 migrant border deaths, while the Tucson sector CBP counted 61.
   
• A 2019 report from the Pima County medical examiner’s office stated that, of the 3,081 migrant bodies it examined from 2000 to 2019, it was able to identify 1,970, or about 64%.