[OC] This charts the margin of Presidential Elections, sorted from largest to smallest, from 1960 through 2024 (current to 14 Nov 2024).
All vote share is shown as a percentage of the Voter Eligible Population, which includes American citizens 18 years old and older who are not disenfranchised by state or territorial laws (e/g, felony conviction).
Margins are only half the percentage difference between the top two contenders. This number of votes would be needed to change the election outcome by flipping from winner to loser.
All votes for candidates other than the top two contenders are aggregated and distributed equally at the center to maintain a consistent margin point at the middle of the chart. If applicable, a major third-party contender is noted (on the losing side).
Data was aggregated in MacOS Numbers and then output via R ggplot with annotations and refinements done in Adobe Illustrator.
Sources and methodology:
Federal Election Commission, Election results and voting information:
Sure order by margin is a choice, but why is it is not in order by year?
turnout looks decent from this perspective
Good chart but it fails to capture how resoundingly Trump utterly trounced Harris by every conceivable metric.
1.1 for 2024? It’s currently at 2% and the projections I’ve seen are more in the 1.5-1.6% after California and WA (ffs, it’s been 10 days) finally finish counting.
Edit – I see why OP’s data looks weird. It is margin *as a percent of eligible voters* not as a percent of votes. Hence why the margins all appear closer than they are typically shown. @OP, why present it like this? It’s confusing and I don’t get the point.
Showing the percentage required to flip outcome? What does that even mean? The “percentage” required to flip the outcome for Biden was 0.023% – about 40000 votes.
Either your label is wrong or you are just confused. The outcome of an election is the winner. By the “votes needed to flip outcome” Trump’s margin in 2016 was like 2-3 times Biden’s, and the margin in 2024 i think I currently estimated to be around 6 times Biden’s.
I feel like the ones where the popular vote doesn’t match the winner should be counted as negative margins
This chart is ugly and hard to parse
The only 2 times a party has won the presidency but lost the popular vote are Republicans. That EC really works in their favour.
The story of America where better then a third don’t participate and margins are razor thin…why?….how?…inconceivable….
How the hell did old Joe Biden manage to motivate a 66% turnout. I guess COVID but still…
This has got to be the single worst representation of data ever created
Strange to think that some of the biggest “blowouts” we think of in Presidential elections were still relatively close in the popular vote.
I always thought 1964 had the highest turnout.
Hey there is a lot of negativity here and I just want to say I love this visualization. I understand the choices and I find it easily readable. Ordering by margin of win, and having the stacked rows set to 100% to show amounts that did NOT vote is great. Great work here.
What is the organization for the y axis???
good stuff, OP.
i’d suggest scaling the horizontal bar length to VEP, and print that number on the left (~245M in 2024, 160M in 1980) and the actual turnout total on the right.
Damn, even though you have the oldest democracy in the world you sure do have a dismal turnout for elections. So many people must feel completely disenfranchised.
I would love to see a root cause analysis of nonvoters.
The common narrative is that they “don’t care.” But, for example, 3% of registered voters have Alzheimer’s disease. Some portion of them, for example, don’t have a valid ID and can’t afford to get a new one. I wonder what percent of the 244 eligible voters are really addressable.
Who the FUCK decided to order the data this way? Is there any kind of order that I’m just missing?
This is interesting data ! Thank you.
And it might be better if the vote total were included, at least for the major party candidates. The sort also seems weird. It would be more useful if it were just sorted chronologically.
![[OC] US Presidential Elections, sorted by margin of popular vote, 1960-2024](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/aiggbtqt5x0e1-1920x1024.png)
21 comments
[OC] This charts the margin of Presidential Elections, sorted from largest to smallest, from 1960 through 2024 (current to 14 Nov 2024).
All vote share is shown as a percentage of the Voter Eligible Population, which includes American citizens 18 years old and older who are not disenfranchised by state or territorial laws (e/g, felony conviction).
Margins are only half the percentage difference between the top two contenders. This number of votes would be needed to change the election outcome by flipping from winner to loser.
All votes for candidates other than the top two contenders are aggregated and distributed equally at the center to maintain a consistent margin point at the middle of the chart. If applicable, a major third-party contender is noted (on the losing side).
Data was aggregated in MacOS Numbers and then output via R ggplot with annotations and refinements done in Adobe Illustrator.
Sources and methodology:
Federal Election Commission, Election results and voting information:
[https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/election-results-and-voting-information/](https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/election-results-and-voting-information/)
University of Florida, National VEP Turnout Rated, data archive:
[https://election.lab.ufl.edu/dataset/national-vep-turnout-rates-1789-present/](https://election.lab.ufl.edu/dataset/national-vep-turnout-rates-1789-present/)
Worksheet of aggregated data:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DSylwUb68x23Bn4Rl2iEis8sU_X9bRuSPe_Ta1-gNMQ/edit?usp=sharing)
2024 Results per Associated Press, 12 November 2024 at 14:00 GMT
Donald Trump
– 312 electoral votes
– Republican Party
– 75,871,131 votes (31.871% of Voter Eligible Population)
Kamala Harris
– 226 electoral votes
– Democratic Party
– 72,859,027 votes (30.605%)
Jill Stein
– Green Party
– 742,502 votes
Robert Kennedy
– Independent
– 717,942 votes
Chase Oliver
– Libertarian Party
– 627,388 votes
Other candidates
– 373,566 votes
Sure order by margin is a choice, but why is it is not in order by year?
turnout looks decent from this perspective
Good chart but it fails to capture how resoundingly Trump utterly trounced Harris by every conceivable metric.
1.1 for 2024? It’s currently at 2% and the projections I’ve seen are more in the 1.5-1.6% after California and WA (ffs, it’s been 10 days) finally finish counting.
Edit – I see why OP’s data looks weird. It is margin *as a percent of eligible voters* not as a percent of votes. Hence why the margins all appear closer than they are typically shown. @OP, why present it like this? It’s confusing and I don’t get the point.
Showing the percentage required to flip outcome? What does that even mean? The “percentage” required to flip the outcome for Biden was 0.023% – about 40000 votes.
Either your label is wrong or you are just confused. The outcome of an election is the winner. By the “votes needed to flip outcome” Trump’s margin in 2016 was like 2-3 times Biden’s, and the margin in 2024 i think I currently estimated to be around 6 times Biden’s.
I feel like the ones where the popular vote doesn’t match the winner should be counted as negative margins
This chart is ugly and hard to parse
The only 2 times a party has won the presidency but lost the popular vote are Republicans. That EC really works in their favour.
The story of America where better then a third don’t participate and margins are razor thin…why?….how?…inconceivable….
How the hell did old Joe Biden manage to motivate a 66% turnout. I guess COVID but still…
This has got to be the single worst representation of data ever created
Strange to think that some of the biggest “blowouts” we think of in Presidential elections were still relatively close in the popular vote.
I always thought 1964 had the highest turnout.
Hey there is a lot of negativity here and I just want to say I love this visualization. I understand the choices and I find it easily readable. Ordering by margin of win, and having the stacked rows set to 100% to show amounts that did NOT vote is great. Great work here.
What is the organization for the y axis???
good stuff, OP.
i’d suggest scaling the horizontal bar length to VEP, and print that number on the left (~245M in 2024, 160M in 1980) and the actual turnout total on the right.
like a population pyramid bar graph.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections?wprov=sfti1#
Damn, even though you have the oldest democracy in the world you sure do have a dismal turnout for elections. So many people must feel completely disenfranchised.
I would love to see a root cause analysis of nonvoters.
The common narrative is that they “don’t care.” But, for example, 3% of registered voters have Alzheimer’s disease. Some portion of them, for example, don’t have a valid ID and can’t afford to get a new one. I wonder what percent of the 244 eligible voters are really addressable.
Who the FUCK decided to order the data this way? Is there any kind of order that I’m just missing?
This is interesting data ! Thank you.
And it might be better if the vote total were included, at least for the major party candidates. The sort also seems weird. It would be more useful if it were just sorted chronologically.
Thank you again!
Comments are closed.