This repo contains data and analysis used to write the article How many votes does it take to change the outcome of a U.S. presidential election?, available on my personal website.
The core analysis and production of graphics is in the Jupyter notebook elections.ipynb.
Data are taken from two sources and compiled into the /data folder:
- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Data and Science Lab provides state-level returns by year. Data is downloadable as a .tab file.
- The U.S. National Archive tracks the number of electoral votes for each state in each election. Each year is on its own web page in a table. I manually copied and pasted each yearly table into a CSV.