Imagine This: 80% of Democrats Go to the Polls in November, 2014.

[Maedhros]

88. Hey - history buffs!

Can someone explain the precipitous drop from a relatively stable 75% turnout from 1836 - 1900 to a relatively stable 55% turnout from 1920 - present?

EDIT: Apparently there's this thing called Google...

http://prospect.org/article/vanishing-voters

The decline in turnout was, as one would expect, entirely by design and aimed to decrease the influence of black, poor and working-class voters:

By the 1890s three key groups came to see this highly participatory political system as dangerous. Because American electoral democracy so effectively mobilized ordinary people, it had always potentially threatened concentrations of wealth. That potential threat became more palpable at the end of the nineteenth century as disaffected economic groups, such as the Knights of Labor and farmers' alliances, turned to electoral politics, culminating in the Populism of the 1890s.

To antiparty reformers and to Protestant, middle-class Americans, the ubiquity of patronage and the emphasis on spectacle and display also seemed a threat to rational government. They wanted to reduce the role of parties and rely more on disinterested, nonpartisan administration to cope with the strains of urban life, industrial disorder, and immigration.

Finally, to conservative Southerners, a vigorous, unfettered party politics endangered the stability of the South's social hierarchies. From 1868 to 1892 both white and black presidential turnout in the South was at least as high as it is now and probably higher, despite violence and other efforts to restrict turnout. The Populist strategy of building a class-based, cross-racial coalition of poor farmers threatened conservative Democrats and their economic allies.

Through gradual changes on a number of fronts, the groups that were dissatisfied with high participation prevailed. In the pivotal 1896 election, the Democrats embraced some of the Populist rhetoric but lost the White House for nearly two decades. The ensuing realignment left the Democrats strong inside the South, but Republicans strong in every other region, and as a result created enough regional one-party dominance to reduce popular interest in politics, particularly state and local elections. The reduced stimulus of less party competition weakened the hold of what Kleppner calls "party norms" on the electorate. Turnout dropped.

The elections of 1896 also set the stage for attacks on earlier electoral traditions. The sway of the two parties in their different regions made it easier to change the rules of electoral politics. In the South, after the collapse of Populism, Bourbon Democrats were free to revive white supremacist violence and to push blacks out of politics. But the new rules they imposed, including poll taxes and literacy tests, excluded poor whites as well.

Outside the South, new rules also made participation more costly. Legislatures established personal registration during workdays. At that time workers had neither an eight-hour day nor an hour off for lunch. Between 1900 and 1930 the percentage of counties outside the South with personal registration jumped 72 percent, according to Kleppner. Nor did legislatures require registration opportunities to be fairly distributed by neighborhood. As Piven and Cloward stress, personal registration depressed worker presence in politics, so that rational politicians increasingly directed their appeals to middle-class concerns. In turn, the absence of populist or collectivist appeals continued to discourage worker involvement in politics until the New Deal.