When it comes to determining voter turnout, several prominent demographic factors can help predict the likelihood of a citizen’s absence or arrival at the polling place on Election Day. Among these key influences are the citizen’s age, gender, and educational level. Older people are much more likely to vote, while younger citizens are less frequently registered and vote much less often. As for gender, in today’s society women show up to vote at a slightly higher rate than their male counterparts. Education also plays a vital role – those citizens with higher-than-average educational qualifications have a much higher rate of voter turnout than those citizens who are less educationally connected.

In order to capture their party’s nomination, a candidate needs to harness and skillfully use 3 big vital factors: money, media attention, and momentum. Adequate funds are necessary to promote a candidate in all the many arenas modern society requires: television and social media advertisements must be produced, adept campaign staff must be found and hired, cross-state and/or cross-country travel expenses are a given – and these are just the beginning. In addition, media attention is crucial for a candidate to deliver his or her message and to communicate their policy stances and suitability to the voting public. Momentum is perhaps the most elusive of these necessitates; a good candidate needs to cleverly pace their campaign course, doling out money and media highlights on a consistent basis so that the candidate will remain constantly relevant and seem increasingly viable in the public eye.

As the first of the nation’s many primaries, the New Hampshire primary is widely seen as the ideal arena to showcase each candidates’ image, with the final vote counts revealing their respective appeal to the voting public. The Iowa caucus is a much more rigid venue; here, candidates are assessed primarily on their ability to earn votes– this serves as a sort of future predictor of how well each might do later on in a hypothetical general presidential election.

While all these other factors do play a role in shaping voters’ choices, long term studies have revealed that, overall, an individual’s party identification ultimately holds the most sway. Party allegiance provides an easy framework from which voters can view the complex political world and the often difficult choices differing policies present. Both parties typically keep steady positions on core issues over the years, so voters are often able to use candidates’ party affiliations as a shortcut of sorts to see where each nominee stands. Voters usually cling very tightly to their party identifications, rarely changing over the course of their lifetime, often because they see their party alignment as part of their wider social identity.

The mass media’s focus on the “horse race” in campaigns is actually rather unhelpful to policy voters. By overlooking the policies and platforms of each candidate, mass media coverage fails to provide voters with enough in-depth information to enable true policy voting. Overall, however, since the 1960s policy voting has become a much easier prospect for voters to engage in. Despite the continued evasiveness of some politicians in uncertain situations (a tendency that may be impossible to fully eliminate), the electoral process does provide ample incentive for candidates to be clearer about their policy stances, especially when there is sharp disagreement between one or more opponents.

One must not identify with a political party in order to be eligible to vote. Many voters choose not to affiliate themselves with any political party, and instead just vote based on the candidates running in each election.

After the Civil War and the passage of the 15th Amendment which guaranteed the right to vote for former black slaves, thanks to Jim Crow laws and racisms, the white majority attempted to disenfranchise black voters with biased and often doctored literacy tests (which were never given to lower-class or undereducated white voters).

Voter turnout is the number of voters who are eligible to vote and actually turn out to vote.

Gathering a number of statistics on voter turnout, political scientists have found that voter turnout is lowest for the least educated Americans.

In the early history of the American republic, the Founders believed that white male property owners had the proper stake in society to vote. The structure and content of the early voting laws in the United States reflect this view.