MultCo turnout down 73% compared to 2020
What does it mean?
Voter turnout in heavily Democratic Multnomah County, Oregon at this stage of the 2024 election is down 73% compared to turnout at this stage of the 2020 election, and down by around 50% compared to recent historical averages, according to data posted by John Horvick, Senior Vice President of Oregon polling firm DHM Research. Multnomah County, which contains almost all of the city of Portland is Oregon’s most populous and contains huge numbers of registered Democrats.
Why is Multnomah County turnout down so significantly at this stage of the election cycle? The short answer is I don’t know, and neither do you, but there are some plausible explanations.
The first is that 2020 turnout was frontloaded compared to historic averages, presumably at least in part due to the pandemic that changed voting patterns nationwide. However, Oregon’s elections have all been entirely vote-by-mail throughout the relevant time period, including in 2020 and again in 2024. One would expect the impact of the pandemic on when people vote would be less than in Oregon than other states that normally allow in-person, election day voting.
The second is raised by Horvick, who suggests the relative tardiness of Multnomah County voters is due to the complexity of Portland’s ranked choice voting system, via which voters are asked, for the first time ever, to rank an enormous number of candidates for city offices.
Surely the large number of candidates competing in a brand-new voting system is confusing for many voters in Multnomah County. However, next door Washington County, also strongly Democrat-leaning but containing only small numbers of voters participating in City of Portland ranked choice elections, turnout is down by over 50% compared to 2020. On Friday, October 25, 2024, only 17% of Washington County voters had cast their ballots, compared to almost 40% 11 days before 2020 election day.*
I don’t have data on average historic turnout for Washington County. However, the Washington County example indicates there’s something else going on with turnout in Portland metro other than just City of Portland ranked choice voting.
The third plausible explanation for the collapse in early voting in Multnomah County is that voters there, by which I mean almost entirely registered Democrats, are less interested in voting in 2024 than they were in 2020. Comparing Multnomah County to more Republican counties does not uniformly support that explanation. Here in Deschutes County, where Democrats constitute a small plurality of registered voters, turnout is at 24%, nearly exactly where it was in 2020.*
Turnout in quite red Josephine County is actually up compared to 2020, 25% to 23%. But the trend of more Republican counties sustaining or increasing turnout relative to 2020 is bucked significantly by very Republican Klamath County. There, turnout is at 22% while it was 33% at this stage in the 2020 election.*
If Democratic turnout were down statewide relative to Republican and non-affiliated voter turnout, Klamath County would presumably look more like Josephine County.
There are all kinds of reasons to be hesitant about any turnout data at this stage of the election. Turnout figures are made available by some county clerks, but not others. The counties I’ve included here posted turnout data through Friday, May 25, 2024. Many counties don’t do that, so they’re not included. Also, county clerks may have different schedules of picking up ballots and counting them as cast, which could create significant variations in the numbers.
It’s possible that there’s nothing significant to the Multnomah County plummet, and turnout in the county will eventually reach the historic norm of around 80%, as Horvick suggests. However, the significant decline in early voting in Multnomah County and Washington County compared to 2020 and, in Multnomah’s case, compared to historic averages is noteworthy, it seems to me.
I’d love to get my hands on Oregon partisan turnout so far in 2024, be it statewide or by county. I have that data for the 2020 election, but not yet for 2024. If I get that data and it helps explain what’s happening with turnout, I’ll update this story.
* Important update regarding county turnout totals:
John Horvick of DHM Research helpfully provided State of Oregon data for turnout on all counties. This is the data he used to create his Multnomah County graph. In the case of other counties to which I compare Multnomah County in this article, I was using data provided directly by county clerks, and not by the state. There may be a lag in reporting from county to state or other irregularities. So, here are the state data on the counties mentioned in this article:
Multnomah 2020 = 41%, 2024 = 11%, decrease = 73% (as stated in article)
Washington 2020 = 22% , 2024 = 13%, decrease = 41%
Deschutes 2020 = 28%, 2024 = 18%, decrease = 36%
Josephine 2020 = 23%, 2024 = 21%, decrease = 9%
Klamath 2020 = 29%, 2024 = 18%, decrease = 38%
The full reports from the state are below. I’m not sure this changes my analysis much. Multnomah down big, Washington down quite a bit, Deschutes down much more than according to the county numbers I was using, Josephine down but not by much and Klamath down by almost as much as Washington.
Other counties’ decline rivals that of Multnomah, in particular Clackamas, which is in the Portland metro area but has a much more equal partisan split than Multnomah.
Thanks to John Horvick for the helpful additional graph and info:
Jeff,
If you're seen a Portland ballot it's pretty obvious why voting is down. It looks like a nightmare from a bad high school Scantron dream. So many bubbles!
The new voting scheme for city council (RCV with STV) that no one truly understands will be disenfranchising voters. And guess who will be disproportionally disenfranchised? POC and lower income individuals who mostly reside in East Portland. You know the ones who brought us Rene Gonzalez and Nathan Vasquez….ousting the extremist duo of Joanne Hardesdy and Mike Schmidt.
The non-representative, un-elected un-diverse Charter Commission chose this method as they felt it would give power to endorsements by the left leaning non-profits, PAC's and service unions as voters would be too confused to know what to do. Looks like it's working.
There is an air of inevitability and resignation among many Oregon voters of whatever stripe or viewpoint. Many know the results don’t really change and haven’t for several decades. The same in-crowd controls the politics and picks their successors. Just look at the endorsement game in the Voters’ Pamphlet. The apathy we are seeing is as much a part of “the plan” as the cookie-cutter candidates themselves. People concerned about the “death of democracy” don’t seem to acknowledge that democracy dies when the public thinks it doesn’t make any difference in the long run.