Turnout soared in 2020 as nearly two-thirds of eligible U.S. voters cast ballots for president
Americans voted in record numbers in last year’s presidential election, casting nearly 158.4 million ballots.
Americans voted in record numbers in last year’s presidential election, casting nearly 158.4 million ballots.
Many of the millions of Americans voting in Tuesday’s midterm elections will have to do so while working around the demands of their jobs – hitting their polling places before work, taking an extra-long lunch break or going afterward and hoping to make it before the polls close. As they stand in line, many of them may wonder why it is that the United States votes on a Tuesday, of all days.
Most Americans like labor unions, at least in the abstract. A majority (55%) holds a favorable view of unions, versus 33% who hold an unfavorable view, according to a Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year. Despite those fairly benign views, unionization rates in the United States have dwindled in recent decades. As of 2017, just 10.7% of all wage and salary workers were union members, matching the record low set in 2016, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
On election night 2018, besides the exit polls there will be an additional source of data on who voted and why, developed by The Associated Press, Fox News and NORC at the University of Chicago and based on a very different methodology. That means that depending on where you go for election news, you may get a somewhat different portrait of this year’s electorate.
The U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member (435 in total) for every 747,000 or so Americans. That’s by far the highest ratio of population to representatives of any industrialized democracy, and the highest it’s ever been in U.S. history.
Since the end of World War II, there have been 225 successful coups (counting the events in Zimbabwe) in countries with populations greater than 500,000, according to the Center for Systemic Peace, which maintains extensive datasets on various forms of armed conflict and political violence. Most coups occurred during the height of the Cold War, from the 1960s through the 1980s.
No other democratic nation fills its top job quite the way the U.S. does, and only a handful are even similar.
Though many Americans say they’re concerned about possible election fraud, the U.S. electoral system generally ranks high in cross-national comparisons.
Both major U.S. political parties have a long history of splits, splinters and other schisms.
Americans generally are less willing to support foreign policies on moral or humanitarian grounds than when they are cast as directly benefiting the United States or its allies.
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