Three Key Graphs From New Census Report on Voting Rates by Race

Census finally released a report on how people voted by racial categories. Here's what you need to know.

By Brentin Mock May 09, 2013

Yesterday, Census finally released a report on how people voted by racial categories, making official what elections scholars have been saying for months: Black voter turnout rate exceeded that of white voters for the first time in our nation’s history.

This is, of course, special because of the voter intimidation and suppression history of America, all the way up to November 2012. While black voters expanded by 1.7 million voters between 2008 and 2012, the number of white voters dropped by about two million — "the only example of a race group showing a decrease in net voting from one presidential election to the next," reports Census.

Below are three key graphs from the Census report:

The above graph shows the wide berth in growth for the black voter turnout rate, as well as the drop in the white voter turnout rate. What’s most troubling in this graph, though, is that it shows a huge drop in the turnout rate for Latino voters — a decrease that has been on a continual slide slide since 1996.

This graph shows the voting rate gap between white voters and each of the non-white voter racial categories. While the black voting rate exceeded the white rate by over 2 percentage points, we see that the Latino and Asian rates fall far below that of the white voting rate. Since 1996, the gap between Latino and white has improved only marginally while the Asian rate has regressed from 15.7 percent in 1996 to 16.8 percent last November.

The most disturbing of the three graphs shows that the black and Latino youth vote has regressed significantly. Consider that black and Latino voters expanded their voting rates by 10.8 and 7.4 percent respectively between 2000 and 2004; but between 2008 and 2012, black and Latino voters decreased their rates by 6.7 percent and 4.6 percent. The much ballyhooed "enthusiasm gap" may have fallen on voters aged 18 to 24.