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.
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1 2 3Voters Turn Out in Record Numbers for 2016 Primaries
More than 60 million votes were cast in this year’s presidential primaries, breaking the all-time record for the two major parties of nearly 57.7 million ballots cast in 2008. More than 30.6 million votes were cast in the 2016 Democratic primaries, compared to more than 30.1 million primary ballots cast in their GOP counterparts. (Both totals could go up a tad as votes trickle in from the primary states where the vote is not yet official.) The Republican total eclipsed the previous record for the number of GOP ballots cast in a single primary season by more than 9 million. The Democratic total this year represented the second-highest number of primary votes ever cast in a single party’s primaries, behind only the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton contest for the Democratic nomination in 2008. The latter set the record for either party of 36.8 million primary votes.
Source: The Rhodes Cook Letter, July 2016
'16 Battle of the Primary Ballots: Democrats Pull Ahead at the End
One of the major story lines of the 2016 presidential primary season was the strong turnouts on the Republican side. That was truly the case, as GOP turnout this primary season eclipsed the previous Republican record, set in 2008, by more than 9 million votes. Yet at the end, more votes this year had been cast in the Democratic presidential primaries than the Republican. There were probably two basic reasons for this. First, the competitive stage of the Republican presidential nominating contest was concluded in favor of Donald Trump in early May, while the Democratic battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders went to the end of the primary season in June. Second, a number of the late primaries from mid-April to June were held in states of the Northeast and Pacific West that boasted large Democratic registration advantages, and as a result, produced higher Democratic than Republican turnout totals.
Source: The Rhodes Cook Letter, July 2016
2016 Presidential Primary and Caucus Totals
One of the major ironies of the 2016 election is that while Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton bear two of the highest negative ratings in the history of presidential campaign polling, both showed themselves to be exceptionally strong vote-getters during the primary season.
Trump won 33 of 38 Republican primary states, a GOP record 13.7-million primary votes (with some ballots still to be posted), and a healthy margin of more than 6 million primary votes over Ted Cruz, his former rival with the next highest vote total.
Clinton took 26 of the 36 Democratic primary states that elected delegates, polled more than 17 million primary votes (the third-highest total ever for a presidential candidate in either party), and beat her persistent, well-heeled challenger, Bernie Sanders, by a clear-cut margin of nearly 4 million votes.
Source: The Rhodes Cook Letter, July 2016
