Voter Turnout in the 2024 General Election within Greenville County

Dive into Greenville County's 2024 election results! Learn which precincts had the highest (and lowest) turnout, the surge in early voting, and how to explore detailed precinct-level data yourself. Plus, a look ahead at what's next for the podcast.

Links:

SC Votes stats walkthrough.

Transcript

Sponsor: This episode is sponsored by Palmetto Project. Forty years ago, South Carolina leaders championed the idea that every social and economic challenge in our state could be solved through innovation. They believed in the power of new ideas to fulfill the promise of our home. Since 1984, the Palmetto Project has listened to and partnered with community leaders and members to transform our state through 330 public-private partnerships. Today, our programs address early literacy for more than 23,000 children through Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, civic engagement, and equitable access to health care through the only statewide nonprofit health insurance agency in the country, and more. Learn more at palmettoproject.org or at our Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Katy Smith: As you may have heard, we had an election last week, and this week we're going to break it down. But as always at Simple Civics: Greenville County, we are interested in local and state issues, not federal, and we are just interested in civic participation. And that's what Nathaniel DeSantis, our producer with Podcast Studio X, and I will discuss. Tune in to learn about what happened and how you can do a deep dive into the data if you're interested, and I suspect that many of you are.

Nathaniel DeSantis: Thank you for that introduction, Katy, and thank you to all the listeners for tuning in. I always love talking to you guys after an election. It's that time of year where I get to talk to the audience, and you and I get to kind of do a recap of what's going on. So in case audience members don't know, we just had an election and there are lots of feelings about that. What's on your mind, Katy?

Katy Smith: Well, we all have lots of feelings. I've seen them from you on Facebook. I've heard them in conversation. We are focused here at Simple Civics: Greenville County on our local and state races. And what we are interested in is participation, not in the outcomes. I mean, we might personally have all of our feelings, but we get excited about civic engagement. And so what we want to talk about today is what is on our mind and how things went with Greenville County's participation.

Nathaniel DeSantis: Well, then perfect. Let's dive right into it. So why don't you give us a high-level overview of Greenville County's participation in this year's election?

Katy Smith: We had outstanding participation in this 2024 presidential general election. We had almost 78% voter turnout. That's 77.76%, if you want it precisely, or 265,507 voters, which is really great for us. In 2020, which was another year with really high turnout, we had 74.12% voter turnout, so higher this year than that big year of 2020.

This year, what was really noteworthy is how many folks voted early or absentee. You guys might remember that in 2020, this was made available because of COVID, because the intention was to spread people out as they came into polling places. And so a lot of people did vote early then, but this year it really took off. 57.7% of voters voted early or absentee. That early vote was about 53%. So many, many of you, in fact, the majority of you took advantage of the chance to go out to an early polling place.

Nathaniel DeSantis: So that's a very impressive increase. We're very happy about that. And is that consistent across the whole county? Is there one district within the county that maybe had a bigger turnout than others? How does that look?

Katy Smith: We always have precincts that perform much better than others. And just as a reminder to everyone, precincts are little geographic areas, each of which has its own polling place. Those are around 2,500 people each precinct is, and it determines where you go vote. And there's always variation by precincts and turnout.

This year, though, it was pretty consistently high across the board, especially compared to some other elections. So in Greenville County, as I think was true the last time we did this debrief, Altamont Forest had the highest turnout with 88% of people there voting. Altamont Forest is in the Paris Mountain area, and the whole Paris Mountain area always does well. The second place was Devenger over on the east side, followed by Tigerville in northern Greenville County. So congrats to you all for really coming out well.

The same precincts tend to be at the bottom of the list of turnout as well, but they performed very well this year. So the lowest turnout precinct was Aiken, and that precinct is a little area that straddles Pendleton Street just before Whitehorse Road. So heading out of the city of Greenville, they had a close to 59% turnout. The second lowest was Greenville 25, which is an area that is between Villa Road, Pleasantburg Drive, and Pelham Road. There's a lot of rental units in that place. And as we've covered in previous episodes, renters tend to have a lower turnout because their registration might be new. They might not know the area as well. So it's understandable that their turnout would be lower. And then Bell Mead was the third lowest. But generally, still a really good turnout across the board.

One other thing that's interesting is looking at who was likely to vote early. So most likely to vote early were the folks in Traveler's Rest 1, a precinct obviously in Travelers Rest, where 75% of the folks there voted early, followed by Tubbs Mountain and Furman. And then least likely to vote early is also not surprising. It is the Dunklin Precinct, which is a geographically large precinct that is pretty much the whole southern part of Greenville County from Pearson Road and Dunklin Bridge Road South.

There just a third of voters voted early. The second lowest in early voting was Gowensville, which is way in the northeast corner of Greenville County. So it's logical because they are farthest from a place to vote early. We had seven places folks could vote early in Greenville County, which was great, but it's still hard to get those geographically close to everyone. But it is neat to see how people varied.

Now, what I'd like to tell you guys is there is amazing detailed data on scvotes.gov, which is our state election commission. If you love data, you can spend a long time poking around on all of the results, including by precinct. And so we're going to put a link on the show notes today to a little video that I have for you about how you can poke around in scvotes.gov and get into the details on all of the turnout by precinct and who got votes. It's really fascinating if you like this kind of thing, which we at Simple Civics: Greenville County do.

Nathaniel DeSantis: A big shout-out to the people over at SC Votes. We've had them on the podcast before to talk about what goes on on election day. And it is really incredible work that they do. I can only imagine how stressful it is. Shout out to them. Go to the episode that we had with them so you can see kind of what's going on behind the scenes with them and all the great work that they do. What are your thoughts on the outcomes of the election?

Katy Smith: So, again, what we are interested in is civic participation. That's the outcome that we are interested in. And clearly such a great turnout demonstrates that people cared. That we are delighted by. And it follows on really good turnout, which I'll add some caveats to in the primary.

So we had our statewide primary in which those parties decided who their candidates would be to show up on the ballot in the general election. Back then, we went from a 14.4% turnout in 2022 to a 17.4% turnout this year. I mean, isn't that so sad that 17% is an excitement? But it's a trend in the right direction.

Now, one thing I'll say is that when people go to vote in South Carolina, and this is not true in every state, but here in our state, you can push a button at the top of your ballot that says, I want to vote a straight party ticket, meaning I just want to vote for all the Democrats or all the Republicans or any other party. So this year, voters in Greenville County, we saw 51 percent of them vote a straight party ticket. They push that button to choose. I only want to vote for one particular party. Of those who pushed that button, 63.5% voted Republican. 35.8% voted Democrat, and the slim balance voted for other parties.

So that is certainly an option. We here at Simple Civics: Greenville County have said in the past, we are not huge fans of straight party voting, not that we have an opinion about what party you should vote for, but we really like people to get to know every candidate, and we note that some of our races are nonpartisan, including our school board and some of our special purpose districts. And folks might not remember to keep looking at their ballot and vote on those nonpartisan races as well. But there's some data for you on how people turned out in that sense.

So higher turnout is a definite great trend in Greenville County. A second thing that's on our mind is that we still saw a lack of competition on the general ballot. We talked about this a lot during the primary, if you're a longer time listener. But on the general ballot in Greenville County, we had 50 races that had significant coverage in Greenville County. So this was, of course, things like our president, Congress, our state house and Senate races, our sheriff, county council, school board, and then things like fire commissioners or sewer and water.

Katy Smith: So 50 races took place in Greenville County. Of those, 23 were contested, meaning that in less than half of those races, your vote helped choose between two or more people. In more than half of the races in Greenville County, ballots gave voters choices. So you might have gone into your precinct and had your ballot come up and you could choose your president, you could choose your member of Congress, which would be either like Kathryn Harvey and William Timmons, or Sheri Biggs and Byron Best. But you might have seen, oh, Sheriff, there's only one choice. Oh, Coroner, there's only one choice. That is not to throw any shade on those choices, who were great people who came in and talked to us in the primary podcast, but it meant those decisions were made in the primary. So if you did not vote in the primary, you did not have a choice on the general ballot. We like competition. We like conversation. We like voters thinking through or having the opportunity to think through who best reflects their values.

Katy Smith: I will note that there are some great candidates who are on the ballot who didn't have opposition. And certainly, we want great people to stay in office if they're doing a great job. So I'll acknowledge that. And I'll also acknowledge that running a political race is expensive. So where there's not competition, of course, there is money saved for other important races or topics, of course. But generally, competition helps sharpen ideas and sharpens our political dialogue. Hopefully not that we're poking at each other, but we're poking to make ideas really strong.

So that's a second thing. And then the last thing is really interesting variations by precinct, which you can see if you can dig into the data. So, for instance, we had a penny sales tax on the ballot in Greenville County to look at adding a tax to help fund roads improvements in Greenville. There was a lot of dialogue between the pro and con sides as the election approached. And you might have seen signs around town telling you to vote yes or no on this. That failed, but by a pretty slim margin. It was like a 51 to 49 percent yes versus no or no versus yes, I guess I should say.

Katy Smith: When you go by precinct and look at that, and again, would encourage you to look at the video that we'll post on how to do that on SCVotes.org, you can see a lot of variation in how people felt about it in City of Greenville versus very rural Greenville County. You can look at how districts that voted for one candidate over another compared to voting yes versus no on the penny tax. So there's just a lot of interesting stuff to see. And you probably see it if you live in one of these precincts and how your neighborhood might be changing or the signs that you saw. So just a lot of interesting lessons that we will continue to learn.

Nathaniel DeSantis: Looking forward into the future of the podcast, what can voters and Simple Civics listeners expect next?

Katy Smith: Well, we will keep on keeping on with the same content we've always provided you all, information on local and state issues, interviews with elected officials and government officials and people who are making a difference in the community. But then we will also have interviews with candidates for city councils next year. So next year, our cities have elections.

Katy Smith: The City of Greenville has partisan elections. So there will be primaries that happen in the spring. And then we'll have general elections in the fall. So we look forward to bringing you interviews with all of those candidates. When we get into 2025, we will hit our 200th episode of Simple Civics. And this year, we interviewed 57 candidates for the 2024 election. So we have learned a lot. We are so appreciative of all of you for listening and being fans and giving us great ideas. So we hope that you'll continue to stay tuned and really that you'll continue to stay involved in your community. One other thing we'll add for you all is some more deep-dive content. Some of you all are super fans and we're so grateful for the donations you've made. We're grateful for the questions that you ask. And we want to give you more content because we know you want to learn more. So please click on the link in the show notes to sign up for some special content newsletters that we'll be sending out.

Katy Smith: We really want to stay engaged with you and want you to stay engaged with us. So that's a new thing you can expect in 2025. The last thing I want to do is really thank the sponsors who have made our election season information possible. And those are Public Education Partners, who sponsored all of our candidate interviews, Beth and Mike Andrews, Upstate Warrior Solution, and Live Well Greenville, who sponsored all of our primary episodes. And all of you, again, who listen and donate to make this possible. We're so grateful to you. And of course, Nathaniel, I want to thank you and Podcast Studio X. You have been just a steadfast partner from the beginning and have really taken on civic education as a passion of yours. And we could not do this without you and Podcast Studio X. So thanks so, so much.

Nathaniel DeSantis: Well, thank you very much, Katy. I appreciate that. It's always great working on these podcasts and helping Greenville County. And something that we were able to publicize last year, last election cycle, I guess, for the primaries that I'll say now, is that we reached a little over 20,000 people for the general election. So I think we're all really excited to be a part of the community and to help reach that many people for a small local civics podcast that's really incredible. So thank you to the listeners as well and everyone for tuning in. And we will keep on keeping on, I think, as you said.

Catherine Puckett: Simple Civics: Greenville County is a project of Greater Good Greenville. Greater Good Greenville was catalyzed by the merger of the Nonprofit Alliance and the Greenville Partnership for Philanthropy. You can learn more on our website at greatergoodgreenville.org.