less one day

Margin swing In 2004 , the margin became more Republican (or less Democratic), relative to 2000, in 33 states, and more Democratic (or less Republican) in 17 states. All six of the largest states (California, Texas, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Illinois) were amongst the 33 states in which the margin swung Republican. In 2020 , the margin swung Republican relative to 2016 in only six states, and Democratic in 44. Three of the six states where the margin swung Republican were amongst the six largest states (California--the largest, of course--Florida, and Illinois).  Increase in vote share In 2004, George W. Bush increased the Republican vote share in 47 states --all save North Carolina, South Dakota, and Vermont. He increased his vote share in all six of the largest states, and in every mega-state (state with 14 or more electoral votes) save North Carolina. In 2020, Trump increased the Republican vote share in only 33 states , amongst which were five of the six largest stat...

I start in 1896 because it was after 1896 that presidential nominees started not regularly setting intra-party popular vote records. Between 1828 and 1896, only Henry Clay in 1832, Lewis Cass in 1848, Stephen Douglas in 1860, George McClellan in 1864, and Benjamin Harrison in 1892 failed to set a record for most popular votes won by a nominee of their party. Of those five nominees, Clay, Cass, Douglas, and Harrison were running in > 2-party contests, and McClellan was running in an election in which a significant portion of the country, most of which had supported Democrats in previous elections, was not participating. Nominees as unlikely as van Buren in 1836, van Buren in 1840, Scott in 1852, and Hayes in 1876 all succeeded at getting the largest number of popular votes for a nominee of their party. (Cleveland also did so in 1888--he and van Buren were, until 2020, the only ones to do so and still lose re-election.) Intra-party records are bolded. Inter-party records are bolded an...

For the elections from 1980 through 2020, I counted any county that a nominee carried that had last voted for the nominee's party before 1972 (if a Republican) or 1964 (if a Democrat), these being the two 'civilizational chaos' elections.  The only exception is Reagan in 1984, because he won in a landslide, and in fact, I quickly scrapped the idea of doing every election, because it became clear that every landslide-winning nominee was likely to have been the first of his party to have carried a number of counties in a long time. However, I do include the counties that Reagan carried in 1984 that had last voted Republican at least 64 years prior (this is the longest ago that any county that Robert Wheel mentions as a county in which a longstanding party winning streak in a county could be broken in 2016 had last voted for the party that he said could be breaking said streak that year). If I am not mistaken, there are only three such counties, which in and of itself is ...

In this post, we'll look at the counties that switched from each major party to the other in every election from 1920 on (as well as a few earlier elections). In some cases, there is a source that gives the number of counties, in which case I link to the source. In some cases, I deduce the number of counties that one of the nominees flipped, from the number that the other nominee flipped and from the number of counties each party carried in the previous election (the figures for which are here ). These can be slightly (hopefully only slightly) off for a variety of reasons, so in these cases, the figure is preceded by a tilde. In cases where I count the counties myself, my principal source is the Crystal Ball database linked here (although I correct for any errors I spot, of which there are a non-trivial number; Wikipedia takes precedence but is not practical to use simply to count turnover counties in a given election).  We'll look at the percentages of each party's counti...