(The Center Square) – Only one state is more politically engaged than New Jersey, and just barely.
Less than four weeks from Election Day midterms, that’s the finding of a study by a personal finance company that ranked the Garden State behind only Maryland. The total score for Maryland was 71.85 and New Jersey 71.80. It was more than 2 more points back to Virginia (69.41).
Rounding out the top five, respectively, were Washington and Oregon.
WalletHub says in a release it compared all 50 states with 10 key indicators of political engagement. This included weighted scores analyzing voters in presidential and midterm elections of 2016, 2018 and 2020; education; accessibility; policies for preregistration of young voters; volunteer political campaign opportunities per capita; and residents participating in civic groups or organizations.
New Jersey, at 78.3%, had the highest turnout for the 2020 presidential election and it also had the highest number of residents registered. The state sprung forward with the second-best increase of electorate who voted between the 2016 and 2020 elections; Hawaii was No. 1.
New Jersey voters this midterm election will select all 12 of their members to the U.S. House of Representatives. New Jersey joins Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, Mississippi and Montana as the only states that have both no governor’s race, and no race for a U.S. Senate seat this midterm cycle.
Dr. Daniel Aldrich, a professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University in Boston, said New Jersey is among the “mostly blue states” that had the higher turnout on Election Day in 2020. He also named Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, Washington, Colorado and Minnesota.
He cautions that could be different this year.
“The political landscape has changed because of the Supreme Court overturning the Roe vs. Wade abortion precedent,” Aldrich said in the release. “With that SCOTUS Dobbs decision, several mostly red state legislatures moved to ban or further restrict abortions, including Idaho, South Dakota, Texas, Georgia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Arkansas.
“We have already seen voters in Kansas – especially newly registered women voters – turn out in large numbers to shoot down an anti-abortion referendum. I think it is very likely that in red states which have previously seen relatively low voter turnout – Oklahoma, Arkansas, West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas – we are going to see higher turnout than in the past.”
Least-engaged state, according to the report, is Arkansas. Also in the bottom were West Virginia (No. 49), Alabama (No. 48), South Dakota (No. 47) and Nebraska (No. 46).
WalletHub’s report says 155 million Americans voted in the 2020 presidential election, representing 66.8% of the voting population. In the midterms for 2018, eligible voters heading to the polls was 53.4%.
WalletHub, the release said, used data from “the U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Responsive Politics; OpenSecrets, Ballotpedia, AmeriCorps, National Conference of State Legislatures, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and Indeed.”
