Below are some charts that a few of you will like, and for others of you will be like reading train tables.
What follows is a each state’s historical voting record for each Presidential Election since 1948. These charts should be fairly easy to interpret: an “r11” (Republican +11) for instance means that the Republican candidate beat the Democratic candidate by 11 points.
The only exception is when an independent or third-party candidate actually won the state. We indicate these cases with an “i7”, meaning that the independent candidate won by a 7-point margin over the second-place finisher.
This next version is actually a little more interesting: this is a state’s electoral history relative to the rest of the country. In 1972, for instance, Richard Nixon beat native son George McGovern by 9 points in South Dakota. However, since Nixon beat McGovern by 24 points overall, this was actually a relatively good showing for McGovern: he overperformed his nationwide popular vote margin by 15 points in South Dakota. Thus, this would be indicated in the table as a ‘d15’ (Democrat +15).
These tables will have a permanent home under the ‘History’ link in the navigation bar.