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As you go about your day today, you might run into some people who decided not to vote yesterday. But it may be a bad sign if it was their first election and they didn't vote.
Salt Lake County had more than 521,000 registered voters this year, which was a record, by far.
Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swensen said, "From the beginning of the year, we actually had about 59,000 new registered voters in Salt Lake County."
County officials have seen spikes of nearly 20,000 or 30,000 new registrations in presidential election years, but never 59,000. Despite any preconceived idea of what you think the average Salt Lake voter is, whether it is liberal or conservative, Swensen says most people register as "unaffiliated."
"I think most people, at least in Salt Lake County, consider themselves to be an independent voter," she said.
Swensen says people between the ages of 18 and 25 make up about 14 percent of registered voters in the county. Other political analysts say that first vote for anyone can set the tone on how active a voter they'll be.
Hinckley Institute of Politics Director Kirk Jowers said, "Studies seem to show, from a few different institutions, that if a person votes the first time they're eligible, they will continue to vote at a very high percentage the rest of their lives."
Jowers says there's talk on whether Barack Obama has sparked a new group of liberal voters, just as Ronald Reagan inspired a group of young conservative voters in 1980. He also says younger voters do likely lean to the left, but they're not as strict a partisan as you may expect.
"For the most part, they are open-minded, and as the straw poll showed, they look at the candidate and not the party first," he said.
The University of Utah held a straw poll which showed a big win for Barack Obama but another landslide victory for Gov. Jon Huntsman.
E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com
