Only 37 percent of eligible American citizens voted in the three most-recent national general elections, despite those elections witnessing some of the greatest turnout in decades, according to a Pew Research Centre analysis issued on Wednesday (July 12, 2023).

The study, which followed individual Americans’ voting decisions for the previous six years, emphasises both the small percentage of the population that regularly votes and the extent to which swings in turnout may alter the electoral landscape. When combined with other, often contradictory sources of electoral data, the findings assist to create a more complete image of the 2022 electorate, reports CNN.

According to the study, almost one-third of eligible US citizens voted in only one or two of the past three elections, while 30 percent did not vote in any of these elections, it said.

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Consistent voters in the previous three elections were about evenly divided between those who supported the Democratic Party (49 percent) and those who supported the Republican Party (50 percent). In contrast, the political composition of less consistent voters changed with each election.

There was also substantial demographic variance in which groups regularly voted, with older and White Americans being more inclined to do so, the report also said.

Regardless of what motivates an individual’s decision to vote in a particular election, turnout volatility can have a significant influence on political outcomes. According to the Pew study, changing turnout was significantly more important than changing minds in the last two midterm elections, the report added.

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“Voters who were more favorable to Republican candidates turned out at higher rates compared with those who typically support Democrats,” the report’s authors write. “Shifting preferences among individual voters – though likely consequential in some races – was a much smaller factor in the 2022 midterms compared with turnout.”

Even a modest adjustment in voting preference can be significant in close elections, and the report adds that some groups, such as rural voters and White voters without a college degree, were disproportionately prone to switch sides.

The biggest change, though, was who did not vote last year. People who voted in 2018, but not in 2022, favoured Democrats by an almost 2-to-1 ratio, 64% to 33%, according to the research. In contrast, 2022 voters who had not voted in the previous four years favoured the Republican Party.

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The Pew Research Centre utilised the nationally representative American Trends Panel to interview 11,377 US individuals in November 2022, including 7,041 adult citizens who were 18 or older in 2018 and for whom credible statistics on turnout and vote choice are available for the previous four general elections. In November 2020, it interviewed 11,818 individuals, and in November 2018, it surveyed 10,640 adults.