The Nation Decides
1872
6,577,665 votes counted (summed from counties) · Excludes third-party votes in 1 county whose source totals are double-counted.
Per-state electoral vote detail is staged from 1976; earlier years show the national college in the bar above, and states are coloured by their county-summed popular vote.
Iowa: the source double-counts some county totals this year, so third-party vote there is understated (shown with a +).
The Map Beneath the Map
Every county that cast a ballot, shaded by its margin. Hover any county to read it; click to open its 156-year profile. Scrub the timeline above and the map redraws in place. Vote counts exist for all forty elections; the demographic lenses begin in 2000.
Drawing three thousand counties…
Who voted for whom? The survey record begins with the 1948 ANES — there is no comparable individual-level account of the 1872 electorate.
Notes on this election
- Greeley (Liberal Republican, endorsed by the Democrats) died between the popular vote and the Electoral College; his 66 electors scattered, 63 of their votes were counted for other men, and 3 posthumous Greeley votes were rejected. Arkansas and Louisiana returns were thrown out.
- County-sum caveat: the source undercounts the Greeley-coalition vote (~2.66M county-sum vs ~2.83M official) — post-mortem chaos, rejected AR/LA returns, and Straight-Out Democrat splinter lines. County-sum two-party Dem share runs ~1.6pp below the official share this year.