Voter turnout in metro Atlanta differs by region, race and income

Some political scientists expect this trend to continue in this year’s election, but others think Vice President Kamala Harris could turn out more voters in areas where voters tend to be underrepresented at the polls.

“With (President Joe) Biden on the ticket, the key motivation for these groups of voters would have been opposing (former President Donald) Trump,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University. “But now you have someone at the top of the ticket who also can provide some additional motivation for younger and nonwhite voters.”

Income, age and education influence voter turnout throughout the U.S., and southwest Atlanta is a convergence of all three factors, disproportionately affecting participation by nonwhite voters. Abramowitz said that poorer, less-educated people are less likely to vote, and nonwhite voters are more likely to be poorer and less educated than white voters.

The trend is exceptionally clear in Atlanta, which tops the nation in income inequality, according to census data.

Although we can see differences based on race and geography, Abramowitz said the driving factors are age, income and, most of all, education.

Chris Grant, a Mercer University political science professor, pointed to the same issues at the root of voter participation.

Although wealthier and white areas regularly have higher turnout than poor and nonwhite areas, Grant said, affluent African American voters turn out more often than white voters when controlling for income inequalities.

He says those differences in income are linked to differences in education, which both Grant and Abramowitz identified as the most significant influence on voter turnout.

In a Democratic stronghold such as Atlanta, voter turnout can have an outsized influence in the outcome of state and even national elections. In a close race such as the 2020 presidential election, when a margin of fewer than 12,000 votes decided the winner, turnout in places such as southwest Atlanta could be a deciding factor.

In 2020, 65% of the 255,000 voters in Atlanta’s high-turnout areas in the north and east cast ballots. But in southwestern areas of the city with lower turnout, just 46% of the roughly 76,000 voters cast ballots. If southwest Atlanta matched the northeast in voter turnout, an additional 31,000 people would have voted in that close election, with the vast majority of these votes going to Biden if voter preferences in the area remained the same.

But getting voters to turn out can come with its own challenges. Obstacles such as difficulty getting time off from work, finding transportation to the polls or ensuring voters are registered before the election can lead to fewer people voting.

One policy that has helped improve voter turnout, Abramowitz said, is the “motor voter” law, which allows voters to automatically register when they apply for or renew their driver’s license unless they decline the option.

Republican senators advanced a bill in the state Legislature earlier this year that would have ended automatic registration and require voters to opt in. That bill did not pass.

Grant said that sometimes voters have more immediate concerns than getting to the ballot box or might feel fatigued from voting year after year without seeing their situations improve.

“The fact that Kamala Harris is the top of the ticket and Donald Trump is her opponent, that may be enough to turn out a lot of voters that didn’t turn out in 2020,” Grant said. “But my hunch is that we’re looking at pretty similar behavior to 2020.”