State Youth Turnout Gap Explorer

Explore the gap between overall and 18-29 turnout by state and year, with institutional and policy context. Powered by the integrated state-year panel (Current Population Survey (CPS) calibrated to Census GVF standard errors, with McDonald voting-eligible population (VEP) benchmarks, Hur-Achen adjustment, National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) policies, and redistricting method).

Turnout gap — overall vs cohort — by state

Each bar shows the percentage-point gap between the state's overall turnout and the selected cohort's turnout. Positive bars (right of zero) mean the cohort voted at a lower rate than the state overall. Negative bars (left of zero) mean the cohort voted at a higher rate than the state overall. The Older 45+ cohort almost always sits on the negative side — older voters consistently outperform the state-wide average. Youth 18-29 almost always sits on the positive side — youth consistently underperform.

Bar color shades from purple (cohort overperforms state overall) through neutral to gold (cohort underperforms). Tooltip on each bar shows the state's redistricting method, policy score, and underlying turnout. Median gap shown as a dashed line for orientation.

Presidential margin vs cohort turnout

Whether state competitiveness (a smaller presidential margin) tracks with turnout is worth checking. At the national level we found no clear state-level relationship between the two (see Finding 7); the per-state, per-cohort view below lets you inspect it directly rather than assume the campaign-attention story holds. One point per state for the selected year and cohort, colored by redistricting method.

The policy lever — does state law actually move the gap?

States with more of the six access-expanding policies in effect (Automatic Voter Registration (AVR), Same-Day Registration (SDR), Online Voter Registration (OVR), pre-registration at 16/17, no-excuse absentee, universal vote-by-mail) tend to show smaller gaps in the state-year panel. The slope above is the linear-regression best fit; the regression line on the chart shows the same relationship visually. One dot per state, for the selected year and cohort. Causal interpretation is supported by the peer-reviewed literature for two of the six policies (Same-Day Registration and mail-ballot expansion); for the other four, the relationship is correlational. See Finding 6 for the intervention catalog and effect-size ranges.

About this data

Source: integrated state-year panel (src/data/state_year_panel.parquet).

Calibration: CPS turnout is self-reported; overall CPS rates run a median ~2.6 pt higher than McDonald VEP voter-file-validated turnout. Intra-state cohort comparisons are more reliable than absolute levels. The turnout_pct_adj column provides Hur-Achen-adjusted rates that match VEP by state.

Institutional variables: Redistricting method from NCSL Congressional Redistricting Commissions page. Policy score sums NCSL-sourced flags for AVR, SDR, online voter registration (OVR), pre-registration, no-excuse absentee, and universal vote-by-mail (VBM).

Caveat (2020): Presidential margin data unavailable for 2020 due to Harvard Dataverse guestbook. Backfill from FEC is a Week 3 task.