Participation at the Margins: is It Race or Class?

From 1960 through 2000 voter turnout was on a steady decline. What seems disconcerting is that race was hardly ever drawn into the conversation as a possible cause for this decline. The large quantity of scholarly literature attributed it to institutional barriers - registration laws, a decline in partisanship, and psychological orientations such as political interest, political trust, and political efficacy. Race was primarily used as a comparative analysis of who is likely to vote versus who is not and the majority of the time, they were spoken of as being represented in the lower order of society. This research however, investigates all theories that have been put forth by students of political participation and goes a step further to analyze voters by social class. What is revealed is that low-income Blacks have the highest probability of turning out to vote in presidential elections than other racial groups. The 2008 and 2012 presidential elections have validated this assessment since 2008 marked the fourth time that voter turnout improved to sixty percent and beyond and 2012 marked the first time in US history that the African American vote surpassed the Caucasian vote.