less one day

These are the states in which presidential nominees most strongly raised their party's vote shares. -If the nominee raised his party's national vote share, they are the states in which he raised his party's vote share by at least 1% more than he did nationally. -If the nominee saw his or her party's vote share decline nationally, they are the states in which he or she raised his or her party's vote share at all. States (and DC) are coloured in the colour of the party that carried them in the election in question. Bolded states are states the party flipped. Italicised states (which are shaded more lightly on maps) are states in which the other party raised its vote share more in the same election.  Benjamin Harrison, 1892 Delaware +5.04% South Carolina +1.76% New Hampshire +0.77% William Howard Taft, 1912 (none) Herbert Hoover, 1932 (none) Gerald Ford, 1976 (national increase: -12.65%) (none) Ronald Reagan, 1980 (national increase: +2.73%) ( map ) Arkansas +13....

These are the counties that voted for Davis in 1924 and for Dewey in 1948. This is part of an in-progress series of posts documenting sets of counties that, at various points, transitioned from counties that 'used to stick with' a party 'even in their absolute darkest hour, but now favor' the other party. In this case, Dewey narrowly lost in 1948. While Cox, Davis, and Smith all lost in landslides in the 1920s, 1924 was the election that offered the most 'legitimate test of the Democrats' national appeal' of the three, and the one in which, arguably, the Democratic nominee best succeeded at 'hold[ing] onto [the party's] core voters' . In 1920, many traditional Democratic constituencies were put off by the League of Nations and Wilsonian internationalism. In 1928, many traditionally Democratic counties in the South turned against Al Smith, the first Catholic major-party presidential nominee. (Conversely, Smith carried a number of counties, some ...

In several posts (such as this one , this one , and this one ), it is established that 1948 was different to 1940 and 1944 other than simply being closer than those two.  The most obvious sign of this is that Truman carried four states that Dewey had carried in 1944: Colorado, Wyoming, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Had Dewey won the Electoral College in 1948 by carrying Illinois, Ohio, and California (which were all closer in 1948 than any of Truman's four turnover states), there would have been states voting for losers of two different major parties in consecutive elections for the first time since 1896. (As it happened, 1896 remains the last time that any state has voted for losers of two different major parties in consecutive elections.) The largest explanation of this seems to be isolationism. As Kevin Phillips wrote in The Emerging Republican Majority (p. 462-463), Then in 1940, the lure of isolationism beckoned many voters...the Republican vote grew large enough for presidential nom...

This is kind of the flip side of this exercise . These are the states where major party nominees were beaten by their combined opposition by better than two-to-one. The states listed here , for any given nominee in any given election, would be a subset of the states listed for his or her opponent here. But this shows where major party nominees have been exceptionally weak, regardless of whether their principal opponent was particularly strong, and this reveals some interesting new things. (States in which the nominee got less than 1/4 of the vote are bolded.) 2020 Biden : Wyoming, West Virginia, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Idaho (22) Trump : Vermont, Massachusetts, Maryland (24) 2016 Hillary Clinton : Wyoming , West Virginia, North Dakota, Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Kentucky (39) Trump : Hawaii, Vermont, California, Massachusetts (73) Hillary Clinton's 21.88% in that state is the worst of any major party nominee in a state since 1980. Conversely, the 73 electoral votes' ...