WASHINGTON -- Foment over health-care reform and spirited primary races enabled Missouri to rank tenth nationally in turnout increase this year, according to a new study.
Illinois also had some hot races but nonetheless was among eight states that registered turnout declines, American University's Center for the Study of the American Electorate found.
Overall GOP enthusiasm was the report's main finding, consistent with polls suggesting a banner Republican year in the November 2 mid-term elections.
For the first time since the 1930 mid-term primaries, Republican turnout nationally exceeded Democratic Party voting -- by more than 4 million.
All told, 17.2 million people voted in Republican primaries and just under 13 million in Democratic primaries. Over 136,000 voted in Green and Libertarian primaries.
The study covered 35 statewide primaries. Republicans had three more contests than Democrats (in Indiana, South Dakota and Utah) but the study said the GOP voting increase was consistent across the country.
Curtis Gans, who directs the voting study center, pointed to the Republicans' "intense intramural battles" since the emergence of the Tea Party movement.
"All things being equal, if the economy weren't in such bad shape, Obama and the Democrats wouldn't be in such bad shape. The party in power gets blamed for it, always has," Gans said.
Gans also spoke of "progressive disallusionment" as part of the reason for the the weak Democratic turnout.
"There's the sense that Obama has not lived up to things that might have been possible," he said.
"The people who made the difference in '08 were mainly young people and African Americans. African Americans weren't going to vote this year unless Obama created a cause in the mid-term elections. And young people are back to not voting."
Missouri's 2010 vote of 20.58 percent of the voting age population amounted to a 30 percent increase over the last mid-term election year in 2006, according to the study. Colorado, Maine and Arizona had increases of more than 50 percent.
Illinois registered a similar 19.8 percent turnout but that rate marked a 2.5 percent decrease in 4 years. Two states, West Virginia and Nebraska, had declines of more than 35 percent.
Long-term, primary voting has steadily declined. In the 1950 mid-term year, 25.5 percent of Missourians and 26 percent of Illinoisans voted in primaries. In the 1930s, mid-terms were drawing nearly 40 percent of voters or more in both states.
Gans, who has been watching election trends for nearly four decades, sees a host of reasons, among them the distractions of television and the erosion of trust in leaders.
More recently, he said, the Internet has enabled people to "make their own little communities" that have little or nothing to do with public affairs.
"What we have lost is the impulse for civic duty," he said.
