Expect pleasant weather when you go to the polls on Tuesday.
“As of today, the weather for next Tuesday in Central New York looks partly sunny and mild with high temperatures near 60 degrees Fahrenheit,” said local meteorologist Kevin Williams in an e-mail message on Thursday.
Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 4.
Election Day weather is a point of concern for politicians because it can affect voter turnout. And sometimes it can affect who wins the election.
There’s some scholarly evidence that weather influences voter turnout, said Danny Hayes, Syracuse University political science professor.
“Studies have provided evidence that weather does depress participation,” said Hayes.
One study, titled “The Republicans Should Pray for Rain: Weather Turnout and Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections,” was published in the Journal of Politics in 2007. The study found that rain on Election Day significantly decreases voter turnout. For every inch of rain that falls, voter turnout decreases by nearly one percent, the study found. Snow has a slightly smaller effect than rain—it decreases voter turnout by about .5 percent.
Bad weather on Election Day can also factor into which candidate wins the election. In their examination of 14 United States presidential elections, the political scientists who conducted the study found that bad weather favors Republican candidates. In a 2006 story in the St. Petersburg Times about the study, some reasons were given for why bad weather affects Democrats more than Republicans.
“Democratic voters tend to be poorer than Republicans and may not have cars to drive to the polls. Those voters, the theory goes, would be more likely to stay home in bad weather,” the St. Petersburg Times reported.
The paper adds that many political scientists characterize Democrats as more of “peripheral voters” than Republicans, meaning Democrats are less likely to vote in every election. This also makes their decision to vote more dependent on external factors such as weather, the paper reported.
For Central New York, the sunny and mild Election Day forecast seems to favor the Democrats, based on this study’s findings.
Weather has caused a voter turnout decrease in Onondaga County before. But it’s been 34 years.
Ed Ryan, Democratic commissioner of the Onondaga County Board of Elections, remembers bad weather causing low turnout. The last time was in 1974, when there was a snowstorm on Election Day, Ryan said.
If there is a snowstorm on Election Day and people had a hard time digging out, it will have an effect on voter turnout, Ryan predicted. “If the weather is bad,” Ryan said, “it doesn’t bode well for high voter turnout.”
(Jamie Munks is a senior with dual majors in newspaper journalism and political science.)
-30-
