Historical Presidental Election Results

Results of presidential elections, courtesy of Ping. He's assembled lots of good data -- how many votes the winner got, how many electoral votes, how many people voted, what percentage of the voting-age population voted. I did a Google search ealier but couldn't find this data.

It's striking to see how close many of the elections are. George H.W. Bush beat Dukakis by only eight points and Clinton beat Bush by only 5 points. But what about reall close races? Carter beat Ford by 2 points and Kennedy beat Nixon by only 0.2 percent of the popular vote. It's really distressing for W to talk about a mandate when so many people voted against him. I guess when you lost the popular vote in your first term, any margin of victory feels immense.

Ping has a good closs on the election results. There were lots of problems in states where the race was close like Ohio and Louisiana. I suspect that close elections are about as accurate as the un-corrected census results. It's small comfort that this year as in 2000, more people intended to vote for the Democratic candidate.