Here at Daily Kos Elections, you might say we have a love of data. It isn’t just a sometimes food, and we gobble up as much as we can. So to share our passion for cookies—er, I mean data—we took the historical election results from the invaluable Dave Leip's Atlas and created this spreadsheet of the presidential election result by state for every election from 1828 to 2016. That period starts with the Democratic Party’s founding under Andrew Jackson and was when nearly every state finally started holding popular votes open to all white men to pick their Electoral College electors.
The spreadsheet itself displays the vote shares for major parties and notable independents with the winning candidate shaded, while it also contains the raw vote counts themselves further to the right. We also added another feature adapted from the Cook Political Report called the “Partisan Voter Index,” which you will see to the immediate right of the vote shares for each year. Our PVI measures the difference between the Democratic candidate’s two-party vote share in a state and their national result. So for instance, when Obama won 52 percent of the two-party vote in 2012, but just 49 percent in North Carolina, that state was R+3.
At the bottom of the sheet, we have also shown the results by the nation’s four major geographic regions: the Midwest, the Northeast, the South, and the West. We took the Census Bureau’s regional definitions and moved Delaware and Maryland to the North, given their more contemporary connection with that region. Hillary Clinton prevailed in the national popular vote by 48-47 and easily won the North by 55-40 and the West by 53-39, but Donald Trump carried the Midwest by 49-45 and the South by 53-43. The 2016 results aren’t yet final, but we’ll periodically update them as official numbers come in. So dive on in and feast upon this wealth of historical data.
