Electoral College Table 1856-2004 by Tom McMahon

Compiled by Tom McMahon July 7, 2007

http://www.tommcmahon.net ([email protected])

This table is the output of an Excel spreadsheet where I entered the Republican electoral votes as positive numbers, the Democratic electoral votes as negative numbers, and then added them all up. A negative number at the bottom of a column year indicates a Democratic victory, a positive a Republican victory. A negative number at the end of a row under the Margin column indicates how many more Democratic electors than Republican electors the state has sent to the Electoral College: these are the All-Time Blue States. Vice versa for a postive number, which indicates an All-Time Red State.

A third-party vote begins with a "T". This makes Excel regard it as a text field so it doesn't add it into the vote totals. In a few cases, a state's Electoral Vote was split. In those cases I simply took the net vote for either the Republican or Democrat. And here's what the columns on the right mean:

• EV's = 2004 Electoral Votes for that state
• Ratio = Margin divided by EV
• Elections = Ratio + 1
• Years = Elections x 4
• Flip Year = 2004 + Years

The "Flip Year" is simply the earliest election that a state could flip over to "the other side", assuming that it voted for the other party every election, and that it kept its 2004 Electoral Votes and didn't lose any via reapportionment.

Aside from the whole Red State-Blue State thing it's kind of fun to scan across the larger states to track their growth (and in some cases, decline).

The source data for this table came from Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.

And finally, if you like this sort of thing you might enjoy my Electoral College Quizes. I give you an Electoral College map, and you try to guess the election year.