More eligible voters cast ballots in this past November’s election than in the last 40 years. Turnout, as it turns out, among those eligible to vote was high. According to a report in Monday’s Washington post 61.6% of eligible voters cast ballots.

Final figures from nearly every state and the District of Columbia showed that more than 131 million people voted. A little more than 122 million voted in the 2004 presidential election.
This year's total amounts to 61.6 percent of eligible voters, the highest turnout rate since 1968, when Republican Richard M. Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey, said Michael P. McDonald, a political science professor at [George Mason University].

You can review McDonald’s work here

My limited subtraction skills suggest that 38.4% of eligible voters didn’t. Since, as Woody Allen has explained, 90% of life is just showing up, the views of the non-voters went unrecorded. However, had they intended to vote “none of the above” we’d be commander-in-chiefless. Did the non voters intend to oppose both candidates? I asked Professor McDonald who he thought they were.

He said that there’s no data yet from 2008 but that –based on 2006 data and past surveys (like Pew Gallop & Annenberg)--
“non-voters tend to be younger, lower education, lower income, politically more independent, and less attentive and knowledgeable about politics. This would seem to indicate that they are Democratic in tendencies; however, the story is more complicated. They tend to be more liberal on economic issues and more conservative on social issues: a sort of person that would like Mike Huckabee.”

To my mind this says we need to connect to the non-voters more. Voter registration and Get Out The Vote campaigns target the groups we imagine to be (or think from polling data) to be our favorables. Until we crack, however, the non-participant portion of the voting population, our election victories will be narrower than they need to be.