Who Will Sit It Out?

The U.S. citizen most likely to go to the polls next Nov. 7 is an upper-income Northern male. He is college-educated and over 40, Catholic or Jewish in religion. About one-third of the people eligible to vote, enough to swing the election, will not go to the polls. Such are the predictions made by two Denver National Opinion Research Center pollsters, Gordon M. Connelly and Harry H. Field, writing in the Summer issue of Public Opinion Quarterly.

Their prediction was based on the 1940 election, in which:

P: 76% of those over 40, only 59% of those under 40 voted.

&3182; The percentages went steadily down from college graduates (81%), through citizens with some high-school education (67%), to grade-school graduates (61%).

P: Economic status (upper fourth, 84%; lowest fourth, 53%) was even more indicative than education. Citizens with plenty of money but only grade-school education, voted 13% more heavily than those with a college diploma but low income.

P: Farmers and manual workers, skilled and unskilled, went to the polls in almost equal percentages. But the white-collar turnout was 15% greater than either.

P: Fewer second-generation Americans went to the polls (64%) than those whose parents were born in an Axis country (75%) or those whose parents were born in another United Nations country (73%).

P: Protestants (66%) and non-church members (67%) lagged behind Jews (84%) and Catholics (72%).

P: Sixteen million of the 30 million nonvoters lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line--18% of them whites who could afford to pay the poll tax.

P: 75% of the men, only 61% of the women voted.

Other findings of Pollsters Connelly and Field: the stay-at-homes were more ignorant of public questions, more isolationist, more complacent about political evils.

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