[OC] Most Votes for U.S. Presidential Candidates, 1920-2024, Adjusted to 2024 Population
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/
Cook Political, 2024 National Popular Vote Tracker (paywall):
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/
Worksheet of aggregated data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets
R code:
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1964 | 0.3834152 | 1 | D | Lyndon Johnson |
| 1936 | 0.3707035 | 1 | D | Franklin Roosevelt |
| 1956 | 0.3455790 | 1 | R | Dwight Eisenhower |
| 1952 | 0.3437379 | 1 | R | Dwight Eisenhower |
| 1940 | 0.3414842 | 1 | D | Franklin Roosevelt |
| 1972 | 0.3409756 | 1 | R | Richard Nixon |
| 2020 | 0.3385666 | 1 | D | Joe Biden |
| 1928 | 0.3312090 | 1 | R | Herbert Hoover |
| 2008 | 0.3290379 | 1 | D | Barack Obama |
| 1932 | 0.3267990 | 1 | D | Franklin Roosevelt |
| 1984 | 0.3233812 | 1 | R | Ronald Reagan |
| 1960 | 0.3171902 | 1 | D | John Kennedy |
| 1960 | 0.3161444 | 0 | R | Richard Nixon |
| 2024 | 0.3158890 | 1 | R | Donald Trump |
| 2020 | 0.3091619 | 0 | R | Donald Trump |
| 2004 | 0.3087437 | 1 | R | George W. Bush |
| 2024 | 0.3065486 | 0 | D | Kamala Harris |
| 2012 | 0.2990801 | 1 | D | Barack Obama |
| 1944 | 0.2984914 | 1 | D | Franklin Roosevelt |
| 1920 | 0.2968718 | 1 | R | Warren Harding |
| 2004 | 0.2937537 | 0 | D | John Kerry |
| 2016 | 0.2896857 | 0 | D | Hillary Clinton |
| 2008 | 0.2838229 | 0 | R | John McCain |
| 1988 | 0.2818048 | 1 | R | George Bush |
| 1940 | 0.2793958 | 0 | R | Wendell Willkie |