Welcome to the Voting and Elections Collection.
Find top-quality reference narratives and documents on elections, parties, voter behavior, and campaigns. Extract election results by meaningful characteristics: candidate, office, locality, and race type over time. Access U.S. election results across states with great historical depth and accuracy.
Featured
1 2 3Elected Independent, Third Party Governors and Senators since 1990
While third party and independent candidates have yet to win the White House, they have had more success in Senate and gubernatorial races. From 1990 to the present, non-major party candidates have won governorships in five states and Senate seats in three. The states involved are generally less populous ones in the northern part of the country. Connecticut and Maine both elected non-major party candidates as governor and senator since 1990. The totals do not include switches to independent status by officeholders elected as Democrats or Republicans or those appointed to office without election.
Source: Rhodes-Cook Letter, Nov. 2013
How to: This maps shows the states which have elected third party or independent governors or senators since 1990. States that elected independent or third party governors appear in orange. States that elected independent or third party senators appear in purple. States that have done both include both orange and purple.
Use the Third Party Candidates tool in Compare Data to find third party House, Senate, and gubernatorial candidates back to 1968.
Read up on the background of Third Parties via Browse Topics.
Is the United States Ready for a Third Party?
Rarely are the conditions that ripe and never are the hurdles that easy to genuinely consider the formation. of a third party that could run competitive candidates for president, Congress and offices at the state and local levels. Yet while the structural barriers remain in the form of fund-raising challenges and ballot access requirements, the political environment these days seems uncharacteristically favorable to the creation of such a third party – if not for 2014, possibly for 2016 or shortly thereafter.
More than half the states (27, to be exact) have voted at one time or another for a third party presidential candidate. That includes all 11 states of the old Confederacy, many of which were carried by Southern-based third parties on multiple occasions. The first was on the eve of the Civil War, when the Democratic Party temporarily divided along North-South lines; the second occasion was in the quarter century after World War II, when the civil rights movement roiled politics in the South. In the rest of the country north of the Mason-Dixon line, third party candidates that succeeded in carrying a state have tended to have a populist or progressive pedigree.
Source: Rhodes-Cook Letter, Nov. 2013
How to: This map shows the states which have elected third party presidential candidates at any time in the country’s history. States in green have voted once for a third party presidential candidate at some point in U.S. history. States in orange have voted twice or more for third party presidential candidates.
The Landslide Election and Close Elections tool in Compare Data allows you to quickly find candidates who achieved certain vote percentages (e.g., between 10 and 30% of the popular vote) for president and other offices.
Use the Elections Results search to find complete results for presidential data.
Top Third Party Presidential Candidates Since World War II
Since World War II, three third party or independent presidential candidates have drawn at least 5% of the popular vote. The first three occurred at intervals of 12 years. In 1968, George Wallace, the past and future governor of Alabama at the time, drew 9,906,473 votes (13.5% of the total vote) and carried five states (46 electoral votes) on his American Independent Party line. In 1980, Rep. John Anderson of Illinois, who earlier in the year had competed for the Republican presidential nomination, garnered 5,720,060 votes (6.6%, 0 electoral votes) that fall as an independent. In 1992, wealthy Texas businessman Ross Perot polled 19,741,657 votes (18.9%, 0 electoral votes) running as an independent. Perot ran again for president in 1996, taking 8.4% on the Reform Party line.
Source: Rhodes-Cook Letter, Nov. 2013
How to: These maps show the top twelve states in terms of vote percentages for each of the three most successful third-party presidential candidates since 1968—Wallace in 1968 (purple), Anderson in 1980 (orange), and Perot in 1992 (blue). The maps demonstrate that the geographic bases of the three candidates differed substantially.
Use the Third Party Candidates tool in Compare Data to find third party presidential candidates back to 1824. You can also choose other offices to view those third party candidates.
Go to the Elections Map to see vote totals by state and county for prominent third party as well as Republican and Democrat candidates.
