Skip to content
Weather
Link copied to clipboard

Weather and democracy

It could get nasty tomorrow, but don't blame weather for low voter turnout.

As noted, the National Weather Service has posted a flood watch for tomorrow, and Accu-Weather's Dave Dombek says it could be raining at almost any time during voting hours.

But if turnout ends up being low, in all probability weather will have had anything to do with it.

Based on experience, in sex-less off-year primaries such as this one, 80 percent or more of the voters opt to pass.

Just 12.5 percent of Democrats bothered to show up for the district attorney's race in Philadelphia two years ago.

Intuitively, it makes sense that rain would put a further damper on voter motivation, but we couldn't come up with any statistical evidence to support a connection.

Awhile back we looked at 30 years of election returns in Philadelphia, and the results argued against the popular myth that weather affects turnout.

For example, taking the 10 elections with the highest turnouts, we found the measureable rain fell in Philadelphia on five of those. Of the 10 elections with the lowest turnouts, seven were rain-free.

Passion for candidates obviously had far more to do with voter turnout than the atmosphere.

The source of the concept of a weather-election connection is unclear. Franlkin & Marshall's Terry Madonna, a long-time political analyst, believes it had something to do with historian Theodore White.

In his Making of the President 1960, White suggests that fine weather across the country buoyed turnout and helped Sen. John F. Kennedy win a narrow victory over Vice President Richard M. Nixon.

Perhaps, but the late weather historian David Ludlum noted that the weather wasn't particularly pleasant in Illinois, which turned out to be the pivotal state in sealing Kennedy's victory.

That said, could rain have been more of a deterrent in Republican rural Illinois than in urban, Democratic Chicago? If so, that could have aided Democrat Kennedy.

Regardless, Madonna has said he has never seen "a scintilla of evidence" that weather affects election outcomes.