Turnout is up slightly but fails to buck the post-war trend

Polling Figures

There were long queues to vote in many cities on Tuesday as Americans sought to do their civic duty, and the polls were kept open in St Louis because so many people wanted to vote. But although turnout overall was higher than in 1996, when it dipped below 50 per cent, experts said that it hardly bucked the trend of a steady post-war decline.

There were long queues to vote in many cities on Tuesday as Americans sought to do their civic duty, and the polls were kept open in St Louis because so many people wanted to vote. But although turnout overall was higher than in 1996, when it dipped below 50 per cent, experts said that it hardly bucked the trend of a steady post-war decline.

Provisional figures put the turnout nationally at "around 51 per cent", just less than in 1992 when support for the third party candidate, Ross Perot, pushed turnout up to 55 per cent. This was a 20-year high, but a blip in a trend of steadily falling participation.

When this year's figures are broken down, however, they are expected to show sharp variations between those areas where the outcome was not in doubt, and the battleground constituencies and states where the two parties concentrated their advertising and turnout efforts.

State-by-state results indicated that the Democrats had succeeded by and large in getting their traditional voters to the polls. A large black turnout is credited for the relative closeness of races in some southern states, such as Georgia and Alabama.

Blacks are among the most loyal Democratic supporters, and a higher or lower participation by this one group can make a difference. Their high participation for Mr Clinton in the 1998 mid-term elections helped the Democrats surmount the liability of Mr Clinton's impeachment. And without their mobilisation in Pennsylvania and Florida, the election would probably have been over sooner.

The trade union vote, concentrated in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Wisconsin, is also seen as having given Mr Gore the edge in these states. Unionised car workers were given the day off in Michigan under the terms of their union agreement, which allowed them not only to vote, but to go door to door and man the phone banks. Union-organised phone banks tracked across the timezones, switching automatically to the next key state as polls in the eastern part of the country closed.

In the latter stages of the campaign, however, the intensity of the Republicans' enthusiasm for Mr Bush contrasted with the dutiful following for Mr Gore and was seen as a distinct electoral asset for Mr Bush. Mr Gore closed many of his later rallies with the union chant: "Early to bed, early rise, work like hell and ORGANISE!" On Tuesday, though, organisation met its match.