List Of United States Presidential Elections By Popular Vote Margin
In a United States presidential election, the popular vote is the total number or the percentage of votes cast for a candidate by voters in the 50 states and Washington, D.C. the candidate who gains the most votes nationwide is said to have won the popular vote. However, the popular vote is not used to determine who is elected as the nation’s president or vice president. Thus it is possible for the winner of the popular vote to end up losing the election, an outcome that has occurred on five occasions, most recently in the 2016 election. This is because presidential elections are indirect elections the votes cast on Election Day are not cast directly for a candidate, but for members of the Electoral College. The Electoral College’s electors then formally elect the president and vice president.
The Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides the procedure by which the president and vice president are elected electors vote separately for each office. Previously, electors cast two votes for president, and the winner and runner up became president and vice-president respectively.
The appointment of electors is a matter for each state’s legislature to determine in 1872 and all elections since 1880, all states have used a popular vote to do so.
Why Does It Matter
Wisconsin sided with the Democratic candidate in all presidential elections from 1988 through 2012, although sometimes by very narrow margins. In 2016, Trump managed to flip the state despite his underdog status in the polls.
Americans are also electing members to the two chambers of Congress, the main law-making body of the US. Those chambers are the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Without support in the Senate and the House, the president’s ability to enact key policies is severely limited.
The winner of the election is determined through a system called the electoral college. Each of the 50 states, plus Washington DC, is given a number of electoral college votes, adding up to a total of 538 votes. More populous states get more electoral college votes than smaller ones.
A candidate needs to win 270 electoral college votes to win the election.
In every state except two Maine and Nebraska the candidate that gets the most votes wins all of the states electoral college votes.
Due to these rules, a candidate can win the election without getting the most votes at the national level. This happened at the last election, in which Donald Trump won a majority of electoral college votes although more people voted for Hillary Clinton across the US.
List Of United States Presidential Elections In Which The Winner Lost The Popular Vote
| United States presidential elections in which the winner lost the popular vote | |
|---|---|
| Year | |
| 1.0% | |
| Comparison of the presidential elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016, in which the Electoral College winners lost the popular vote. |
There have been five United States presidential elections in which the successful presidential candidate did not receive a plurality of the popular vote, including the 1824 election, which was the first U.S. presidential election where the popular vote was recorded. In these cases, the successful candidate secured less of the national popular vote than another candidate who received more votes, either a majority, more than half the vote, or a plurality of the vote.
In the U.S. presidential election system, instead of the nationwide popular vote determining the outcome of the election, the president of the United States is determined by votes cast by electors of the Electoral College. Alternatively, if no candidate receives an absolute majority of electoral votes, the election is determined by the House of Representatives. These procedures are governed by the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is important to note that the U.S. Constitution does not require states to hold a popular vote, however, since 1880, electors in every state have been chosen based on a popular election held on Election Day.
You May Like: How Much Did Trump Lose The Popular Vote By
What Is The Electoral College
In the United States, something called the Electoral College determines how many votes a presidential candidate gets in an election.
Each state has a certain number of votes for presidential candidates roughly tied to the population of the state. This number is equal to the number of representatives and senators the state sends to Congress.
For example, New York, the state where I live, has 27 representatives and therefore 29 Electoral College votes. Washington, D.C. which doesnt have any members of Congress has three Electoral College votes.
But the rules also say each state must have at least one representative and there can only be 435 members of the House. Because of the way those available seats are divided up, certain states have fewer representatives per person than in other states.
For example, each of the 53 representatives in the House from California represents roughly 746,415 people. In Wyoming, that number drops to 577,737 for their one representative.
This means the national popular vote which goes to the candidate who won the most individual votes can be somewhat different than the Electoral College vote.
Thats what happened in the 2016 election. Large portions of city-dwellers in blue states voted for Clinton, giving her the most votes nationally.
Electoral College Bias And The 2020 Presidential Election
See allHide authors and affiliations
Edited by Larry M. Bartels, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, and approved September 7, 2020
Read Also: How To Message President Trump
Presidential Election Results: See States Won By Trump Biden
This combination of pictures created on October 22, 2020 shows US President Donald Trump and Democratic Presidential candidate and former US Vice President Joe Biden during the final presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenness
OAKLAND, Calif. – To win the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump or Joe Biden needs to secure 270 votes in the Electoral College.
Each candidate has a different path to victory. As always, there are battleground states where the matchup between the incumbent and challenger is too close to call. For Trump, Pennsylvania and Florida are seen as the most important swing states. Biden is looking to win Wisconsin and Michigan, two states that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. The former vice president also appears competitive in Georgia and Arizona, which have reliably voted for Republican candidates.
Below is an interactive Electoral College map followed by a list of election results from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
United States Presidential Election In Pennsylvania
The 2016 United States presidential election in Pennsylvania took place on November 8, 2016, as part of the 2016 United States elections in which all 50 states and the District of Columbia participated. Pennsylvania voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote.
On April 26, 2016, in the presidential primaries, voters selected the Democratic, Republican, and Green parties’ respective nominees for president. Pennsylvania is a closed primary state, meaning voters must have been previously registered with a particular political party in order to vote for one of that parties’ candidates, to participate in their respective party primary. The Republican party candidate was Donald Trump, who won Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes out of more than 6,000,000 cast, a difference of 0.72% and the narrowest margin in a presidential election for the state in 176 years, since 1840 when William Henry Harrison defeated by just 0.12%.
Pennsylvania was one of the eleven states to have voted twice for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 which Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. Although Wisconsin eventually delivered the Trump victory, when the Clinton campaign learned that they had lost Pennsylvania, they then knew that they had lost the election. Trump became the first Republican ever to win the White House without carrying Chester County, and the first Republican to win Pennsylvania without carrying any of Philadelphia’s suburban counties.
Read Also: What Does Trump Call Joe Biden
Election Results In Battleground States
The table below details the number of Congressional districts won by each candidate in the battleground states.
| 2020 presidential results by Congressional district, battleground states |
|---|
| State |
The following is a list of post-election lawsuits involving the presidential election. Where available, case names and numbers, states of origin, courts of origin, and links to complaints and docket reports are provided.
Biden Team Already Working Toward Transition
Biden will be inaugurated as president on Jan. 20, whether Trump acknowledges his win as legitimate or not. Biden has already begun the process of transitioning to the countrys highest office.
Though Trump has not formally conceded, his administration has granted the new administration access to intelligence briefings, office space, secure computers and other government services, USA TODAY previously reported. Trump tweeted Nov. 23 that the move was made at his recommendation.
The announcement, made by Emily Murphy of the General Services Administration, allocated over $6 million to Bidens transition team for hiring and other transition-related expenses. Since then, Biden has made a number of Cabinet picks, including his chief of staff, Treasury secretary, director of national intelligence, head of the Department of Homeland Security, ambassador to the United Nations, climate change envoy, secretary of State, Defense secretary and Health and Human Services secretary.
You May Like: Who Will Be Running Against Trump
State Changes To Voter Registration And Electoral Rules
In addition, the Pennsylvania legislature proposed a plan to change its representation in the electoral college from the traditional winner-take-all model to a district-by-district model. As the governorship and both houses of its legislature were Republican-controlled, the move was viewed by some as an attempt to reduce Democratic chances. Ultimately they did not do it, leaving their winner take all format intact as of 2020.
Primaries
With an incumbent president running for re-election against token opposition, the race for the Democratic nomination was largely uneventful. The nomination process consisted of primaries and caucuses, held by the 50 states, as well as Guam, Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Democrats Abroad. Additionally, high-ranking party members known as superdelegates each received one vote in the convention. A few of the primary challengers surpassed the president’s vote total in individual counties in several of the seven contested primaries, though none made a significant impact in the delegate count. Running unopposed everywhere else, Obama cemented his status as the Democratic presumptive nominee on April 3, 2012, by securing the minimum number of pledged delegates needed to obtain the nomination.
| This article is part of a series about |
| This article is part of a series about |
Primaries
| 0.006% |
Candidates in bold were on ballots representing 270 electoral votes.
How Does The Electoral College Work
To clarify, our Republican, not Democratic, electoral system works like this :
- The people vote on November 8th as an advisory vote.
- On December 19th electors meet in their state and vote for the President and Vice President on separate ballots. This is a direct vote. At this step it is theoretically possible for faithless electors to upset the popular vote by voting against the state majority in states that dont ban this completely.
- Lastly, on January 6th, Congress meets to count the votes.
- Whoever gets a 270 vote majority out of the 538 electoral votes on January 6th, not November 8th, wins. If there is no 270-vote majority, the House of Representatives decides the next President.
Since the popular vote is an advisory vote, nothing was set in stone until the electors cast their vote until December 19th, 2016 and then the Senate and President signed off on it.
State-based electors could have changed their pledged votes in 29 states per state-based rules, and technically all could have changed their vote per the Constitution .
These odd truisms of our Republic could have resulted in a win for Clinton or even a third party candidate via the House .
However, to be clear, the chances of the electors going faithless and not voting with the winner-takes-all system is unlikely from a historic standpoint in any election.
Recommended Reading: How To Write A Letter To President Trump
In The Popular Vote Why Wasnt Bidens Victory Bigger
In the 2020 election some Democrats, buoyed by misleading polls and their own hopes, believed that Joe Biden might win a landslide. But a quick look at recent history reveals how improbable those predictions were.
We live in an era of closely contested presidential elections without precedent in the past century. During the past nine contests stretching back to 1988, not one candidate has won by a landslidea margin defined as 10 percentage points or more in the popular vote. Bill Clinton enjoyed the largest edge during this period8.5% in his 1996 reelection campaignfollowed by George H. W. Bush with a 7.8-point edge in 1988 and Barack Obamas 7.2 in 2008. In four of these nine elections, the winner failed to receive a simple majority of the popular vote in two, the Electoral College winner did not receive even a plurality.
Contrast this picture with the results of the presidential elections between 1920 and 1984. In 14 of these 17 elections, the winner won a majority of the popular vote. In two others , the winner failed to clear this threshold by less than half of one percent. In 10 of these elections, the victor won in a landslide, and two others the victor fell just short.
Against the backdrop of the past nine elections, how does Joe Bidens victory measure up?
How Many States Did Trump Win
How many states did Trump win in the 2016 election?
Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in November 2016. Trump won the electoral vote against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton 304-227. Donald Trump won the vote of 30 states while Hillary Clinton won 20.
While some historically Democratic states like California and New York stayed democratic in 2016, Trump won some crucial states that had previously voted for President Obama in 2012, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
PVI is the Cook Partisan Voting Index.This measures how strongly a Unite States congressional district or state leans toward the Democratic or Republican Party compared to the nation. For example, if the national average is 49% Republican, and the Republican candidate of a state wins 58% of the two-party share, that state voted nine percentage points more Republican than the country, or R+9.
The states with the highest PVI that voted more Republican, or the most Republican states than the national average are Wyoming , Utah , and Oklahoma . The PVI of all 50 states in the 2016 election was R+3.48. Wyoming is the most conservative state in the US, having voted a Republican Party candidate for every presidential election since the 1950s .
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire were all even between Republicans and Democrats in the 2016 election. Trump ended up winning Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Read Also: How To Send A Message To Trump
