[flagged]
In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
Compounded with that, the voting eligible population (vep) increased exactly as predicted. Which means for each early demose of someone in the vap, someone else already in the vap became eligible when they hadn't been previously. Perhaps some states changed their laws about who was eligible?
Regardless, the cleaner way to compare election years is by % VEP or %VAP - otherwise you're effectively comparing population between the years by accident. From this perspective I disagree with GP, 2024 was still a great year for turnout... just not as good as 2020. 2024 sits 2nd in VEP and 7th VAP (out of the last 24 elections).
That fact falls into a whole class of "new records" which sound impressive but are usually meaningless, because it's closer to the default outcome.
In this case, the voting-age population was (yet again) going to increase, so each "new record" in votes cast becomes boringly-normal rather than unusually interesting. The same also happens with certain dollar-amount records, which are not adjusted for inflation or overall economy growth.
A similar phenomenon to https://xkcd.com/1138/ , except it has to do with trends over time rather than geographically.