Which voters turned out less in MA?

[GOTV]

I looked at some tables on Boston.com and compared turnout between areas that Obama carried and areas that McCain carried. I used these tables:

Best and Worst cities for Obama and McCain
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/election_results/top_bottom_town_president/

2008 results per town
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/election_results/ma_president/

2010 results per town
http://www.boston.com/news/special/politics/2010/senate/results.html

I took the 10 best cities for Obama and the best 10 cities for McCain and I compared the turnout between 2008 and 2010 for those 20 areas. From that data I created this spread sheet (so you can check the math):

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tcsexGxY6hbueD_HbEYzdMA&output=html

One city, Aquinnah, was the best city for Obama in 2008 but was not listed in the 2010 table so actually I compared the remaining 9 best Obama cities to the 10 best McCain cities.

Here's what I found for the 2 sets of cities in 2008:
Obama cities: 81.37% <= turnout winner
McCain cities: 78.40%

Here's what I found for the same 2 sets of cities in 2010:
Obama cities: 59.00%
McCain cities: 61.40% <= turnout winner

Turnout understandably falls in off year election but it appears Obama leaning voters were more likely to stay home than McCain voters this time around.

One caveat - I could not find a direct listing of the 2010 turnout per city so I calculated it by comparing the vote totals between 2008 and 2010. Therefore I'm not taking into account population shifts in the intervening 14 months.

[phleshdef]

1. With those numbers being so close in both cases, its really about the same proportionally.

[GOTV]

2. Well the difference is almost identical to the difference between Coakley and Brown

Obama areas fell off 22%, McCain areas fell off 17% which is a 5% difference.
Brown got 52% and Coakley got 47%, a 5% difference.

Maybe it's not significant, I'm not really a stats guru.

[timeforpeace]

3. Brown got as many votes as did McCain in 2008.

[Fla Dem]

4. Wow...just wow. Just seeing how many 2008 blue cities and towns

went red yesterday is mind numbing. I grew up and lived a great deal of my life in the suburbs north of Boston. I am floored that so many of those cities and towns went republican. Most of those areas have always been true blue democratic areas. Much worse than I thought. I just spoke with my aunt who lives in western Ma, she is 93. She was undecided going into the polls. But in the end, she couldn't vote for anyone but the democrat. She said, she's just been a democrat for too long to vote for a republican this late in her life.