Why down-ballot matters.
The races on this site — Senate, House, judges, county seats — are decided by a fraction of eligible
voters, often by people who know little about the candidates. The numbers tell the story.
~20%
Average share of eligible Americans who vote in primary elections — the contests that decide who even
appears on the November ballot. In 2024, only about 34 million of roughly 149 million eligible voters
cast a primary ballot.
Sources: academic study via Clark Univ.; The Midterm Project (2024 figures)
~80%
Of eligible voters do not participate in primaries. Turnout in the 2022 midterm primaries
was just 21.3% — still short of the 35%-by-2026 national target set by reform advocates.
Source: Bipartisan Policy Center
60%
Of North Carolina voters in one study could not name a single justice on their own state supreme
court — a court whose seats appear on the very ballots they cast.
Source: study cited in Maine Law faculty publication
~25%
Average turnout across 340 U.S. mayoral elections in one analysis. Some big-city mayors have won with
single-digit turnout; Philadelphia elected its mayor in 2019 with just 27% turnout.
Source: FairVote, summarizing a 2013 study
½
In San Francisco's 2014 election, roughly half of the people who voted skipped the judicial races
entirely — even though nearly everyone marked a choice for president two years earlier.
Source: KQED analysis of San Francisco turnout
56–68%
The range of U.S. general-election turnout since 2000, versus just 18–29% for primaries. General
turnout runs more than double primary turnout — and falls off further the lower you go down the ballot.
Source: States United Democracy Center
The party-label fallback
Research consistently finds that when voters lack information about down-ballot candidates — state
legislators, judges, county clerks, registers of deeds — they fall back on the party label as a
shortcut, rather than the candidate's record or qualifications. The less voters know, the more a
single letter next to a name decides the outcome. That's exactly the gap this project exists to close.
Source: American Political Science Review; political-science research on voter heuristics