If historical elections occurred with a 2024 voting population, these could have been the results. This chart plots the votes cast for U.S. presidential candidates as a share of the voting-eligible population during that election year, and then adjusted to a commensurate share of the voting-eligible population of 2024.
Election data was aggregated from The Federal Election Commission archives, with corroboration and missing data derived from the American Presidency Project and Wikipedia. A working spreadsheet of the aggregation can be found in the links below.
Data was assembled in MacOS Numbers, charted and output to SVG from R ggplot, and then refined in Adobe Illustrator.
University of Florida Election Lab, National VEP Turnout Rated, data archive:
2024 Results per Cook Political Report (Thu, 05 Dec 2024 13:31:00 GMT)
– 77,287,591 Donald Trump
– 75,002,294 Kamala Harris
– 2,946,201 Other
– 155,236,086 Total
Adjustment to 2024 population is a product of VEP_SHARE and 244,666,890 (2024 Voting-Eligible Population as estimated by University of Florida Election Lab). VEP_SHARE of 2024 candidates result from current vote counts as a proportion of VEP.
Isn’t it ironic that Nixon is in first place 💀
Nixon being #1 is proof that popularity isn’t everything.
Showing the voting percentage is on average 60% is weird
There are far too many variables for these numbers to have any significant meaning.
Any extrapolations from such statistics are the epitome of pseudo science.
I’m shocked Reagan isn’t higher since he won 49 states in 1984.
Why did you choose to adjust for 2024 population, instead of just showing % of eligible voters? This feels unnecessarily confusing/misleading.
Also, on a visual design note, the yellow color is a bit too much for me, it’s reducing the contrast with the foreground and making it harder to read.
This is interesting, and nice execution. As always, the comment section has cynicism, criticism, and “look at me, I’m the smartest person in the room”. But I think this is a great conversation starter, and easy to consume. Kudos.
Proof that Americans, on average, are not exceptional, yet
Is this beautiful data? I would answer with a resounding ‘no’. Why show a fake number (‘adjusted to 2024 population’) when the percentage is already there and tells the same information? At a glance, this decision will lead to incorrect conclusions, and to me that makes the data very ‘ugly’.
How to fix? Just show the percentages, that’s the point of the graph, as far as I can tell.
It still kills me that the crime nixon’s administration committed, which I would describe as really quite petty, resulted in him crying on camera and resigning from the job and then just flying away. Meanwhile the idea that Trump would be held accountable for similar behavior is laughable.
My initial reaction is shock by how low Reagan is on the list.
I think I need more context on the value of this analysis. I would have thought 08 Obama would have been higher than 12 Obama. I also would have thought Reagan would be higher.
Why not show all 54 winners and runners up? Would be curious to see eg 1992.
Joe still has more than Trump haha
Holy shit the 2016 election. What the fuck happened with electoral votes between 1960 (Kennedy winning with a few hundred thousand votes more than Nixon) and 2016 (Trump winning with 3 million less votes than Clinton)? A truly busted system.
Everyone always makes big deal about the 49 state 1984 Reagan down there at 17th place with 30.29% of the voting population. If the 1/3rd of the country that doesn’t vote ever decided to give a shit this nation would not even look the same afterward.
How on earth is it possible that Joe Biden and Roosevelt got the same number of votes, and that represents roughly the same percentage of the eligible voting population 80 years apart? The population exploded since then.Â
![[OC] Most Votes for U.S. Presidential Candidates, 1920-2024, Adjusted to 2024 Population](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/w44bcm6rd15e1-1650x1024.png)
18 comments
If historical elections occurred with a 2024 voting population, these could have been the results. This chart plots the votes cast for U.S. presidential candidates as a share of the voting-eligible population during that election year, and then adjusted to a commensurate share of the voting-eligible population of 2024.
Election data was aggregated from The Federal Election Commission archives, with corroboration and missing data derived from the American Presidency Project and Wikipedia. A working spreadsheet of the aggregation can be found in the links below.
Data was assembled in MacOS Numbers, charted and output to SVG from R ggplot, and then refined in Adobe Illustrator.
University of Florida Election Lab, 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/)
Cook Political, 2024 National Popular Vote Tracker (paywall):
[https://www.cookpolitical.com/vote-tracker/2024/electoral-college/subscriber](https://www.cookpolitical.com/vote-tracker/2024/electoral-college/subscriber)
Federal Election Commission, 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/)
Worksheet of aggregated data:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DSylwUb68x23Bn4Rl2iEis8sU_X9bRuSPe_Ta1-gNMQ/edit?usp=sharing)
R code:
[https://github.com/ptrdo/mostest](https://github.com/ptrdo/mostest)
Final data:
2024 Results per Cook Political Report (Thu, 05 Dec 2024 13:31:00 GMT)
– 77,287,591 Donald Trump
– 75,002,294 Kamala Harris
– 2,946,201 Other
– 155,236,086 Total
Adjustment to 2024 population is a product of VEP_SHARE and 244,666,890 (2024 Voting-Eligible Population as estimated by University of Florida Election Lab). VEP_SHARE of 2024 candidates result from current vote counts as a proportion of VEP.
|YEAR|VEP_SHARE|WON|PARTY|CANDIDATE |
|—-|———|—|—–|——————|
|1972|0.3737383|1 |R |Richard Nixon |
|1936|0.3707035|1 |D |Franklin Roosevelt|
|1964|0.3669308|1 |D |Lyndon Johnson |
|1956|0.3455790|1 |R |Dwight Eisenhower |
|1952|0.3437379|1 |R |Dwight Eisenhower |
|1940|0.3414842|1 |D |Franklin Roosevelt|
|2020|0.3405675|1 |D |Joe Biden |
|1928|0.3312090|1 |R |Herbert Hoover |
|1960|0.3281278|1 |D |John Kennedy |
|1960|0.3270459|0 |R |Richard Nixon |
|1932|0.3267990|1 |D |Franklin Roosevelt|
|2012|0.3191482|1 |D |Barack Obama |
|2024|0.3158890|1 |R |Donald Trump |
|2020|0.3109890|0 |R |Donald Trump |
|1988|0.3100921|1 |R |George H.W. Bush |
|2024|0.3065486|0 |D |Kamala Harris |
|1984|0.3028770|1 |R |Ronald Reagan |
|2016|0.3025992|0 |D |Hillary Clinton |
|1976|0.3009532|1 |D |Jimmy Carter |
|1944|0.2984914|1 |D |Franklin Roosevelt|
|2008|0.2974414|1 |D |Barack Obama |
|1920|0.2968718|1 |R |Warren Harding |
|2012|0.2950251|0 |R |Mitt Romney |
|2016|0.2894174|1 |R |Donald Trump |
|1976|0.2885468|0 |R |Gerald Ford |
Isn’t it ironic that Nixon is in first place 💀
Nixon being #1 is proof that popularity isn’t everything.
Showing the voting percentage is on average 60% is weird
There are far too many variables for these numbers to have any significant meaning.
Any extrapolations from such statistics are the epitome of pseudo science.
I’m shocked Reagan isn’t higher since he won 49 states in 1984.
Why did you choose to adjust for 2024 population, instead of just showing % of eligible voters? This feels unnecessarily confusing/misleading.
Also, on a visual design note, the yellow color is a bit too much for me, it’s reducing the contrast with the foreground and making it harder to read.
This is interesting, and nice execution. As always, the comment section has cynicism, criticism, and “look at me, I’m the smartest person in the room”. But I think this is a great conversation starter, and easy to consume. Kudos.
Proof that Americans, on average, are not exceptional, yet
Is this beautiful data? I would answer with a resounding ‘no’. Why show a fake number (‘adjusted to 2024 population’) when the percentage is already there and tells the same information? At a glance, this decision will lead to incorrect conclusions, and to me that makes the data very ‘ugly’.
How to fix? Just show the percentages, that’s the point of the graph, as far as I can tell.
It still kills me that the crime nixon’s administration committed, which I would describe as really quite petty, resulted in him crying on camera and resigning from the job and then just flying away. Meanwhile the idea that Trump would be held accountable for similar behavior is laughable.
My initial reaction is shock by how low Reagan is on the list.
I think I need more context on the value of this analysis. I would have thought 08 Obama would have been higher than 12 Obama. I also would have thought Reagan would be higher.
Why not show all 54 winners and runners up? Would be curious to see eg 1992.
Joe still has more than Trump haha
Holy shit the 2016 election. What the fuck happened with electoral votes between 1960 (Kennedy winning with a few hundred thousand votes more than Nixon) and 2016 (Trump winning with 3 million less votes than Clinton)? A truly busted system.
Everyone always makes big deal about the 49 state 1984 Reagan down there at 17th place with 30.29% of the voting population. If the 1/3rd of the country that doesn’t vote ever decided to give a shit this nation would not even look the same afterward.
How on earth is it possible that Joe Biden and Roosevelt got the same number of votes, and that represents roughly the same percentage of the eligible voting population 80 years apart? The population exploded since then.Â
That’s sus.Â
Umm, you’re missing a few.
Comments are closed.