Unregistered voters favor Obama over Romney by three to one

If the U.S. Constitution required everyone to vote, President Obama could be sworn in for his second term right now. Among those in the United States who are eligible to vote but have not registered, forty-three percent said they would vote for Barack Obama in 2012, if they were to vote. Another fourteen percent said they would instead vote for Mitt Romney, while forty-three percent apparently said that if they were to vote, they still wouldn’t vote. That’s some defiance for you right there. According to various studies, as many as one-third of eligible Americans aren’t registered. While Obama currently holds a margin of five points or less over Romney among registered and likely voters, he has the support of as many as sixty-five percent of the overall population…

The study from USA Today offers a few reasons for the apathy among so many of the Americans who believe Barack Obama is the better choice: some think that “nothing ever gets done” either way, while others are merely apathetic. In contrast, while far fewer Americans believe that Mitt Romney would make the better president of the two, they’re far more likely to actually register and vote. The numbers suggest that the United States is a primarily liberal-to-moderate nation, but apathy toward the political structure left to us by the founding fathers has left many of those liberals and moderates unwilling to participate in the process at all, thereby leaving conservatives with a roughly fifty-fifty shot of winning the election despite being significantly in the minority.

This revelation suggests that the Obama campaign could increase its odds of winning simply by encouraging registration and voting in general. It may also explain why the republican party has been championing laws which make it more difficult to vote, requiring more forms of ID on election day and other tactics which are expected to lower the total voter and registration count across the board. By simply reducing the percentage of Americans who end up voting, the Romney campaign increases the odds that the votes it receives from the conservative minority will be enough to carry the day.