Voters deserted the polls

Walter Burnham, University of Texas - Our cautious guess is that turnout in this year’s Congressional races will finally  The drop off in voting turnout from the presidential election of 2012 to 2014 is the second largest of all time — 24 percentage points. And the turnout decline this year is broad and to levels that boggle the mind — rates of voting that recall the earliest days of the 19th century, before the Jacksonian Revolution swept away property suffrage and other devices that held down turnout. Turnout in Ohio, for example, fell to 34 percent — a level the state last touched in 1814, when political parties on a modern model did not exist and it had just recently entered the Union.