who votes: what decides who turns out?

I wanted to look at three things that effect who votes. Social scientist call this things variables. The three variables I am going to look at the age of voter, educational level of the voter and race of the voter. By doing this I hope to help explain who votes and in turn help you all look at why Obama won. We'll begin with age. The effect of age on turn out is one of the strongest indicators of who votes and can be seen by looking at life cycles. Young people by and large do not vote like 40 year olds. The reason for this is that young people are less sedentary, more mobile. they have less invested in there communities than those who are married with families. for example a father of two elementary school age children is much more likely to vote for his school board than a 20 year old.With age turnout increases steadily and plateaus at around age 40. If you are not voting by 40 you most likely never will. The second variable is educational level. educational level is an even stronger indicator than age. for example some one with a collage degree has a 94% likelihood of voting as compared with a 58% likelihood among those lacking a high school diploma. This can be explained in three ways. First, those who have complete college have an increased sense of civic duty. Second, they are able to more easily overcome social hurdles such as being able to lose half a day's income to go and vote. Those lacking a diploma are more likely to be in lower paying jobs and cannot afford to lose money to vote. lastly, the cost of information gathering is lower. Additionally, this is all coupled with an increased interest in civic affairs that is corollary to educational level. Lastly we will address race. While hard to believe when you control for educational level and age both race fall out of the equation. They have no bearing on who votes in light of the educational level and age. The one exception to this is called the empowerment effect. the empowerment effect is when a minority candidate is running for office and his or her minority group turns out and trumps the age and eduction of the minority group in question. We saw this in the 2008 election of Obama.