2024 brought high voter turnout – but a growing racial gap – Good Authority

New data shows that while white turnout has spiked, turnout among Black and other non-white Americans has stagnated.
More than 155 million Americans – 64% of eligible voters – voted in the 2024 presidential election. Although turnout declined slightly from 2020, it was still higher than in any other election in a century – seemingly a sign of democratic health. According to new data, however, this recent era of high voter participation has also featured a troubling expansion of racial inequality in turnout.
Over the past year, we have constructed detailed estimates of voter turnout by demographic group in U.S. federal elections from 1980 to 2024. Combining information from the U.S. Census Bureau, academic surveys, voter files, and election returns, these new estimates provide highly accurate measures of group-level voter turnout at both the national and state level.
The figure below displays estimates of self-reported turnout for four major racial and ethnic groups, focusing on U.S. presidential elections. As the graph shows, turnout among all groups has risen substantially since its low point of 1996. At the same time, white Americans have retained or even expanded their turnout advantage over other groups.
Presidential turnout among white Americans increased in two bursts, the first in 1996–2008 and the second in the Trump elections of 2016–2020. (In midterm elections, all the turnout growth has come since 2014.) As a result, white turnout in 2024 was about 5 percentage points higher than it was in 2008 and 15 points higher than in the 1980s and 1990s.
Historically much lower than white turnout, Black presidential turnout increased rapidly between 1996 and 2008. In fact, by the Obama elections of 2008 and 2012, Black Americans were just about as likely to vote as white Americans. Since 2012, however, Black turnout has trended downward; in 2024, it was about 5 points below its 2008 peak. Our estimates indicate that this drop was concentrated among Black Americans without a college degree. Overall, the Black–white turnout gap was -11 percentage points in the 2024 presidential elections, a level similar to the 1980s and mid-1990s.
But that estimate likely undersells how large the Black–white turnout gap has become. Our most exhaustive estimates – not used in the graph above because they are not available before 2006 – also incorporate data validating self-reported turnout. These estimates indicate that Black turnout is consistently lower than self-reports would suggest. This finding is consistent with other work on voter validation.
Incorporating that data tells an even more grim story. First, Black turnout did not actually surpass white turnout in 2012; it merely matched it.
Second, the Black–white turnout gap was even worse in 2024: about -16 points rather than -11.
Third, Black turnout has actually converged with the turnout rate of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters – a significant change for two groups that have been quite distinct historically. Prior to 2024, Latinos and Asian Americans have turned out at an even lower rate than Black as well as white Americans. But both Latinos and Asian Americans also saw a steady increase in turnout beginning in the late 1990s. Since 2012, Latino and Asian American turnout has mirrored white turnout more closely than Black turnout, though Latino and Asian American turnout remains well below white turnout. (The gap is even larger in midterm elections.)
Political scientists generally highlight three factors that explain political participation: resources, engagement, and mobilization. Although white Americans continue to have access to greater resources, such as wealth, resource disparities have probably been too stable to explain changes in the turnout gap among racial groups.
Changing patterns of political engagement and mobilization are more likely culprits. Although Trump’s efforts to mobilize infrequent voters have included people of color, white Americans have been the primary target. At the same time, Trump has elicited a backlash among other groups of white Americans. Trump’s rise has thus boosted engagement among both his white supporters and his white opponents, with turnout among both white non-college (+9%) and college-educated (+5%) voters increasing between 2016 and 2020.
But the same is not true of other racial groups. One possible explanation is that Black and Hispanic Americans have become less reliably Democratic. As a consequence, both intrinsic motivation and social pressure to vote have probably diminished in these groups. A decline in Black and Latino support for Democrats may also have decreased Democratic-aligned organizations’ perceived return on investment to mobilizing these groups, prompting them to shift to alternative strategies. The net result of these forces would be to depress Black and Hispanic turnout even as white turnout rose.
Since Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, the United States entered a period of sustained high turnout in federal elections. Though turnout will surely dip as usual in the 2026 midterms, it may well bounce back again in the 2028 presidential election. Contrary to common intuition, however, higher turnout does not guarantee a more representative electorate. In fact, recent elections have brought the stagnation, or even reversal, of earlier trends towards convergence in turnout across racial groups.
In particular, the turnout gap between Black and white Americans has returned to levels not seen since the 1990s. This reversal has occurred at the same time as states and the Supreme Court have questioned the continued need for Voting Rights Act protections in an era of supposed parity in voter turnout. Our work suggests that this conclusion is premature – it is still too early to declare victory over racial inequality in political participation in America.
Davin Caughey is the Class of 1949 Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is co-author, with Chris Warshaw, of Dynamic Democracy Public Opinion, Elections, and Policymaking in the American States (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Bernard L. Fraga is the Ann and Michael Hankin Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies Program at Emory University. He is the author of The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Robert Griffin is a political scientist and the Director of Research at Democracy Fund.

Christopher Warshaw is a professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. He is co-author, with Devin Caughey, of Dynamic Democracy Public Opinion, Elections, and Policymaking in the American States (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
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