ContentsPresidential vote since 1868
United States · presidential returns, 1868–2024
Presidential vote since 1868
Of the 418 counties in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, 342 gave the Democratic candidate a majority of the two-party vote in 1960, 86 in 1964, 294 in 1968, 10 in 1972 and 367 in 1976.
Every map here uses 2020 county boundaries and one colour scale for all 40 elections from 1868 to 2024, so a change of colour between two years is a change in the vote. Set the baseline to 1960 and step from 1964 to 1976 to see each change as one map.
The 1968 count is a two-party share. George Wallace ran as a third-party candidate that year and carried Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. His votes are left out of both sides of the ratio, so the 1968 map shows how the Humphrey and Nixon votes split, and a county Wallace carried can still appear Democratic.
Change the year, the baseline, or play the sequence
Cycle
Playback is paused until you start it, and stops at 2024 rather than looping, because a jump from 2024 back to 1868 would be 156 years presented as one step.
Baseline
With a baseline, the map paints the change in percentage points on its own symmetric scale, separate from the level map’s, which is a share in per cent.
Jump to
1964 · Lyndon B. Johnson vs Barry Goldwater
61.4% Democratic two-party nationally · 3,101 counties reporting, 98.7% of the 2020 county map
Click a county to see all 40 of its cycles here. The map says who was ahead in one year; when a county turned needs the sequence.
Regional means, computed from this map
| Region | 1964 | Reporting |
|---|---|---|
| The Deep South | 34.0% | 418 of 418 |
| New England | 68.0% | 67 of 67 |
| The Mountain West | 55.8% | 277 of 281 |
Unweighted means over counties, not over voters. These counties range from a few hundred people to a few hundred thousand, and weighting by population gives a different number. “Reporting” is the number of counties each mean used, out of the region’s counties on the 2020 map. Regions are whole states. Appalachia is not among them because its federal definition names counties one by one across parts of several states, and a whole-state version would be a different region under the same name.
1964: The year of the Civil Rights Act. Johnson won nationally and lost most Deep South counties to Goldwater. Set the baseline to 1960 to see the change as one map, then step on to 1968, 1972 and 1976.
The regional means are means over counties, which is a choice with a cost: a region’s smallest county counts as much as its largest, so the mean answers “what does a typical county in this region look like” and not “how did this region vote”. Both are real questions and they have different answers. The count beside each mean is the denominator it used, because in the early cycles most of these counties have no returns at all.
Drawing it this way costs something else, and the cost is the site’s own subject. These are 2020 boundaries under 1868 returns, so a county that was split in 1890 carries its successor’s shape and a territory, which cast no presidential vote, is grey even where it had counties. An honest long-run map cannot avoid that choice; it can only state which one it made.
County returns: Algara and Amlani, 1868–2020 (doi:10.7910/DVN/DGUMFI), and MIT Election Data and Science Lab, 2024 · boundaries: US Census cartographic, 2020, held fixed across all 40 cycles · Alaska is left out: it is absent from the source before 2024 · 50 counties that existed only in the 19th century have no county code and cannot be drawn