Yes — stronger political parties do increase voter turnout, and the American experience with nineteenth-century party machines is the clearest evidence. When parties were organizationally powerful, deeply staffed, and materially invested in getting people to the polls, presidential turnout routinely ran above 70 percent of eligible voters and peaked at 81.8 percent in 1876. Since the reforms that dismantled those machines, turnout has settled between roughly 50 and 65 percent and has never returned to nineteenth-century levels. The 2024 election drew 64 percent, which Pew Research Center described as the second-highest turnout rate in the past century.1Pew Research Center. Voter Turnout in the 2020 and 2024 Elections A figure that counts as exceptional today would have been a weak showing in the 1880s.
Why Strong Parties Move More Voters
The connection is not mysterious. Strong parties in the machine era treated voter turnout as an organizational mission and built the infrastructure to deliver it. Precinct captains knew voters personally, sometimes tracking supporters at the tenement-building level. If someone hadn’t shown up at the polls by mid-afternoon, they got a visit or a hand-delivered note. Tammany Hall in New York City ran ward-level operatives who functioned as “the eyes and ears of Tammany at the block level, or at the district level or at the tenement level,” monitoring supporter attendance throughout election day.
That kind of coverage required people, and people required paying. Patronage supplied the workforce. Winning an election meant handing government jobs, contracts, and favors to loyal operatives, who then had a direct financial stake in winning the next one. Lose, and the whole apparatus lost its livelihood. That personal economic pressure made party workers extraordinarily motivated to mobilize every possible voter.
The Mobilization Toolkit
Machines drove turnout through several overlapping tactics:
- Systematic door-to-door canvassing by workers who often knew voters by name and had done them personal favors, making it harder to brush off a request to vote.
- Party-printed ballots. Before the 1890s, each party produced its own distinctively colored ticket, deposited in a ballot box in full public view. Operatives could see which ticket a voter carried, so defection was risky and vote-buying was verifiable.
- Rallies and parades that built community identity around candidates, mixing politics with entertainment and food.
- Election-day transportation to polling places, removing practical barriers for voters with distance, work, or mobility issues.
Social Services Bought Long-Term Loyalty
The most effective machines understood that election-day favors alone weren’t enough. In an era with no government safety net, Tammany Hall and similar organizations built an informal welfare system for immigrant communities. A job, a basket of groceries, help navigating city bureaucracy, or simply respectful treatment — all of it flowed through the local party operative. As Tammany’s Big Tim Sullivan put it: “I don’t feed a man because he’s good. I feed a man because he’s hungry.”
The arrangement was transactional. Every favor created an obligation, and the payoff came on election day. It was also remarkably effective at pulling people into politics who might otherwise have been completely disengaged.
The Turnout Numbers
The correlation between strong parties and high turnout is not speculative. From roughly 1840 through the end of the nineteenth century, presidential election turnout among eligible voters regularly approached or exceeded 80 percent:
- 1860 (Lincoln): 81.2 percent
- 1876 (Hayes–Tilden): 81.8 percent, the highest in American history
- Turnout above 70 percent was routine across the period
By contrast, modern presidential turnout has hovered between 50 and 65 percent for most of the past century. The 64 percent recorded in 2024 tied the 1960 Kennedy–Nixon contest and stood as the second-highest modern rate.1Pew Research Center. Voter Turnout in the 2020 and 2024 Elections
What Happened When Parties Were Weakened
The strongest evidence that party strength drives turnout is what happened when party strength was deliberately cut. A series of reforms enacted mostly between the 1880s and early twentieth century broke the machines’ grip on American politics, and turnout dropped with them.
The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 required federal jobs to be filled through competitive examinations rather than political loyalty. It made political firings illegal for covered employees and forbade requiring government workers to make campaign contributions or do campaign work.2National Archives. Pendleton Act (1883) Without patronage jobs to distribute, parties lost their most powerful tool for building the army of local operatives who knocked on doors.
Beginning in the late 1880s, states adopted the Australian ballot: a single official government-printed ballot listing all candidates, marked in private. Parties could no longer verify how anyone voted, so vote-buying and coercion collapsed as tactics, and straight-party loyalty loosened.
The Progressive Era brought direct primary elections, taking nominations away from party bosses. When voters choose nominees directly, the boss’s ability to control the slate collapses, and with it much of the reason for maintaining expensive precinct-level infrastructure.
The Hatch Act of 1939 extended the Pendleton logic to a broader group of federal and certain state and local employees, barring them from using their positions to influence elections, soliciting contributions, or running in partisan races. The connection between government employment and party work was severed further.
After these reforms took hold, presidential turnout dropped from the 80-percent range into the 50-to-60-percent range and stayed there. The party infrastructure that had physically brought voters to the polls was gone, and nothing replaced it with the same intensity. By 2025, a record 45 percent of American adults identified as political independents rather than members of either major party.3Gallup. Party Affiliation – Gallup Historical Trends That figure would have been unthinkable in the machine era, when party identity was woven into family life, neighborhood culture, and economic survival.
What This Says About the Question Today
The historical record answers the question directly. Stronger parties produced substantially higher turnout, and weakening those parties reduced turnout by roughly 20 percentage points. That relationship shows up both in the mechanism (personal contact, material incentives, transportation, social services) and in the natural experiment reformers ran when they dismantled the machines.
A boundary worth noting: none of this is an endorsement of the machines themselves. The features that made them effective at driving turnout also made them vehicles for corruption, coercion, and vote-buying. The reforms that cut turnout were aimed at real abuses. But the tradeoff was real. Modern campaigns spend enormous sums on data analytics, targeted advertising, and get-out-the-vote operations trying to replicate what precinct captains once did through personal relationships, and the turnout gap between the two eras suggests no amount of technology has fully replaced a party that knew your name, helped you find a job, and showed up at your door on election day.1Pew Research Center. Voter Turnout in the 2020 and 2024 Elections