In response to our post from earlier this week on the size and scale of Barack Obama's popular vote victory, several readers wrote in to ask how Barack Obama's popular vote total ranks as a share of the United States population at the time of his election.
Obama has received at least 68,724,397 popular votes for the Presidency. I say "at least" because they're still counting in California and several other states, and so Obama's total should wind up comfortably over 69 million; 70 million appears unlikely, but is not entirely out of the question.
This total represents 22.62 percent of the Census Bureau's 2008 estimate of United States population, which was 303,824,640. That figure doesn't sound that impressive at first glance -- fewer than one in four Americans actually voted for Barack Obama -- but it's actually the second-highest percentage ever, trailing only Ronald Reagan in 1984:
(Note: for 1900 onward, population figures are based on yearly Census Bureau estimates as of July 1st of the year in question. For years prior to 1900, they are based on a linear extrapolation of population figures from the nearest decennial Censuses.)
Modern candidates, it should be noted, have several distinct advantages over older ones. In particular, the vote now extends to women, African-Americans, and 18-to-21 year-olds, which it did not originally. There are no longer any poll taxes, or any of the widespread suppression of the black vote that was present until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Also, the population has gotten a little older as human lifespans have increased, which means that the percentage of the population which is of voting age has increased. Finally, the percentage of the population which are US citizens (i.e. the percentage that aren't immigrants) is lower than many periods throughout history...
...still, Barack Obama can lay claim to being president of the entire country in a way that few candidates of the past can.
11.28.2008
The Population and the Popular Vote
@ 2:25 PM
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Dead freakin last.
I just don't get how Cali is still counting.
*
2ND
Your graph showing percentages won by candidates should probably indicate that you're only listing winning candidates. Some losers won higher percentages than others listed in the chart, such as Ford in 1976 (who won 17.96%) and (obviously) Gore in 2000.
It has always shocked me how few people vote. Why do people not vote?
This is nice, but it seems to me that the percentage of eligible voters (from yesterday's post) is the more relevant number. Support considered as a fraction of a population that includes infants and non-citizens seems a bit irrelevant.
The largest win by a non-incumbent in US History!
Now THAT'S A MANDATE!
@sarasotajoe
You are exactly right. Using the total population in the denominator for voting percentage is about as misleading as using the total population for the birth rate.
That's why such rates are always adjusted for age-eligibility, or are calculated on an age-specific basis.
Sen. Bob Dole probably feels great after reading this. Clinton's re-election numbers look pitiful compared to other winners.
I guess the 72-hr GOTV plan was missing some devoted volunteers, hard campaign cash, and zeal for the electoral message in '96?
That's too bad. I wish we could have frozen Dole in time to run against Obama in '08. Would have been more fun to watch.
And that's coming from a Democrat.
By that same logic, I calculated McCain garnering about 19.55% of the population, which is kinda decent.
Would "eligible voters" be readily-available data?
The caveats listed at the end basically invalidate this as a useful metric at all. In addition, third party candidates need to be included in our thinking. In other words, because of Perot Bill Clinton will not be on this list. Anything prior to 1970 is probably not including all eligible voters. Therefore, you only realistically can compare Obama with Bush 1 in 88, Reagan both times, and Nixon in 72.
The Blue Economist Whither Reaganomics?
It would be nice if you could show population of citizens as well as eligible voters. Pure population is pretty misleading.
Also, some elections had strong 3rd party candidates (more than 1% of the vote) and should somehow be factored in.
How many people in history have gotten more votes in democratic elections? India is probably the only place you have to check?
Its funny, McCain was pushed as the strongest republican candidate and he will lose by over 9 million votes and an outside shot of 10 million votes and by over 7 percentage point. How big would Obama would have won against another republican?
If you take out those 22 lines the names of those who were incumbents at the time of their election, only 12 remain and Obama is on top:
Obama 2008 22.62
Eisenhower 1952 21.63
Bush 1 1988 19.99
Reagan 1980 19.32
Kennedy 1960 18.94
Carter 1976 18.73
Roosevelt 1932 18.28
Bush 2 2000 17.88
Hoover 1928 17.78
Clinton 1992 17.61
Nixon 1968 15.84
Harding 1920 15.16
Pardon my formatting. And would some argue that this is not relevant?
Figuring out eligible voters would be difficult. Post-19th Amendment, technically everyone of age had the right to vote, but practically this was not the case. So "eligible" would have to be separated from "legitimately eligible" somehow.
Hey Nate-
You say you used US Census population data. Can you give me an estimate of the percentage of the popular vote he got of eligible voters? Reason why i ask this is because
1) In many states, felons are not eligible to vote
2) A raw total US population statistic would include the under 18's-who are also ineligible to vote
before we start talking about how few Americans vote, we have to first look at how many Americans can vote to begin with, and then look at a percentage of those folks to see what the turnout really was. Alot of the comments so far have suggested that our apathy is lamentable-which it is-but before we start pulling our hair out over how apathetic we are as a culture, let's see how many people could have voted but chose not to.
FDR's 1936 total would have been larger had not the black vote been artificially lowered in the former Confederate states.
@Bryan: Yes, there are two readily available bases for calculating proper voting rates. The "VEP" (voting eligible population) and the "VAP" (voting age population).
One of the most important contributions by Michael McDonald at George Mason University is in showing the importance of choosing the most meaningful denominator if you want to assess levels and changes in turnout.
Obama actually received 32% of the popular vote (using 213,005,476 as the voting-eligible population per the United States Elections Project.
Note: some immigrants are citizens through naturalization, thus the terminology in the original article is inaccurate.
Great stuff...
Nate, can you also run the numbers for proportion of eligible voters? Does he beat Reagan then?
You really need to move on regarding this crap. The election is over. None of this matters. You can win by a few EV or many. Either way you are 100% president. Look at Bush 2000. He didn't even look back after the close election. Full Power.........
Jack-be-nimble: that's a very bad example.
Bush used full power when he wasn't overwhelmingly elected. Yes its legal and he is free to do so, but politically doing so has consequences. Namely pissing off almost (or in Bush 200's case -more than) half of the electorate.
I like how the populations are given to the nearest person. "... and two!"
Clinton's numbers in 1992 and 1996 were affected by the presence of Ross Perot, who got more votes than third-party candidates normally get. George Wallace got a significant slice in 1968, too. John Anderson in 1980? Not so much.
homunq: India uses a Westminster system, so people only vote for their local parliamentary candidate. At the last elections (2004), the Congress Party got over 103 million votes in total, but those were not votes for a single candidate. I don't think there has been any election where a single candidate got more votes than Barack Obama did.
Outside the U.S., the largest totals for a single candidate are probably the 58 million votes President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil got in the runoff of his 2006 re-election, and the 52 million votes Dmitry Medvedev got when he was elected President of Russia a few months ago.
"still, Barack Obama can lay claim to being president of the entire country in a way that few candidates of the past can."
...because I said so.
-Nate
Actually, I now see that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia got slightly more than 67 million votes in the runoff for the 2004 presidential election. That suggests SBY might actually beat Obama in the next presidential elections (scheduled for July 2009), when he will run for re-election.
Anyone else notice that Obama won the most votes of any non-incumbent ever? Reagan's first election at 19.32% doesn't even come close to Obama's 22.62% share. I wonder what happens at Obama's reelection in 2012?!
Apparently, my fellow liberals are going to spend the next four years proving how wonderful Obama is rather than scrutinizing policy. But I digress. I was happy to see you list of "caveats" at the end of the article; I had thought of many of those myself. One additional issue: 1984 came at a time when participation in elections was at an extremely low level. In fact, it was on a generational skid, that bottomed out in 1988. So, 52 percent of the over 18-year-old population voted in 84, while somewhere on the level of 64 percent voted this year. I am trying to find data on the 18 and over category for other years. Currently, it's 75 percent.
Here are relevant numbers going back to 1960. As I mentioned previously, turnout percentage of the voting-age population already exceeds that in every election post-1968. Post-1968 should really be read as post-26th Amendment. That's the one that made eligible voters out of 18, 19 and 20-year-olds.
As to the number of votes which remain to be counted, here are the percentages of the 2008 totals as opposed to the 2004 totals on the relevant wikipedia.org pages for the top twelve electoral prizes and a couple of close ones:
California: 6.38%
Texas: 9.00%
New York: -5.02%
Florida: 10.26%
Illinois: 1.81%
Pennsylvania: 2.82%
Ohio: 0.12%
Michigan: 3.36%
Georgia: 18.85%
North Carolina: 23.13%
New Jersey: 5.98%
Viginia: 16.33%
Indiana: 11.47%
Missouri: 10.68%
Whether Obama reaches 70 million depends on how much higher turnout was over 2004 in the industrial-Midwest. Michigan has certified. The vote count for Wisconsin, like New York, remains below the 2004 count.
JSZ: wow, ask and it shall be answered.
Here's one that is a bit harder: Obama is ranked number 1 right now for number of votes in a single election. A million years from now, where do you think Obama will rank? I'd bet it is not below #500, though obviously I could be arbitrarily wide of the mark.
hell i I dont understand why they are still counting votes.with the technology in the world today we should have a very clear cut way of knowing results after the election.. Its because the republicans want to CHEAT. THAT THE ONLY REASON.
damitajo1:
One additional issue: 1984 came at a time when participation in elections was at an extremely low level. In fact, it was on a generational skid, that bottomed out in 1988
That's not an "issue"; voting enthusiasm is inseparable from the end result we're measuring here -- how many votes a candidate received. Certainly the candidates and parties are not entirely responsible for the level of enthusiasm, but if you're going to say that it's something that "just happened" and has no relation to them, there's no point to comparing vote percentages at all.
Nate, thanks for the info. One correction:
"Finally, the percentage of the population which are US citizens (i.e. the percentage that aren't immigrants) is lower than many periods throughout history..."
That actually works against modern candidates (since, of course, non-citizens aren't eligible to vote).
Hey, Nate, you ought to know that "human lifespan" is the same as it ever was! Plenty (or at least, some) of the ancient Romans lived well into their nineties, and poor African subsistence farmers have the same human lifespan as American statisticians. It's life expectancy that has varied. ;-) (Keep up the good work, though!)
Millennials will make up one-third of the electorate by 2016 - 40% of Obama 2008 voters were Minorities.
The Astonishing thing of this Election is the swinging of Youth from conservative to liberal.
Obama only has to recover the economy and help Millennials to get jobs and start in life ( families, houses, etc ..)..
It could be that Millennials buy the foreclosed houses.
This youth is the key to 2012. The proportion of Young Voters seems to be increasing as a share of Total Voters.
Milenials.com
Vicente Duque
The U.S. had about 231 million persons 18 or older living here on Election Day. That would be a better denominator than the entire U.S. population.
If I had the energy, I'd dig up the Census' 2006 Voting Report to get that year's estimate of how many people were eligible to register and vote, as opposed to how many were over 18, and use that to refine the numbers further. But I'm lazy tonight.
@JSZ: In this election, no one has yet voted for Obama. The electoral college convenes on 12/15.
Millennials will make up one-third of the electorate by 2016 - 40% of Obama 2008 voters were Minorities.
The Astonishing thing of this Election is the swinging of Youth from conservative to liberal.
Obama only has to recover the economy and help Millennials to get jobs and start in life ( families, houses, etc ..)..
It could be that Millennials buy the foreclosed houses.
This youth is the key to 2012. The proportion of Young Voters seems to be increasing as a share of Total Voters.
Milenials.com
Vicente Duque
----------------------------------
By 2016 the minority population will be larger and whites will decrease as far as the population in this country.
i still think it is interesting that even though Obama won by more than 9,000,000 votes, John McCain only needed one tenth of those votes to switch to his side in the right five or six states to have the electoral college swing his way. i punched the numbers a couple of weeks ago and i think Obama could have lost the election while garnering a four percentage point lead in the popular vote.
Assuming that Obama, having the greatest population to pull from, won the most votes, for a president ever, 68.7 million, it's interesting to look at his runner up; Bush 2004 (62 million).
Now the population grew in these four years by roughly 10 million, (303.8 in 2008, and 293.6 in 2004). Which means, considering Bush and Obama's percentages are within the same percentile, that of the 10 million newly naturalized citizens, Democrats (and/or Obama) won %70.
It would be interesting to factor first-time voters into this math. Obviously not every vote that increased this years winner's total from 2004, was a new voter, but it does signify what could be a dramatic problem for the Republican party in years to come, worse than, dare I say, Sarah Palin?
rr—
Worse than that. The right FL, IN, NE-2, NC, OH and VA voters numbering a little less than 380,000 (current reported counts) voting McCain rather than Obama (or 760,000 additional voters for McCain) would leave Obama with a lead somewhere in the neighborhood of 6.4% (8.3 million votes) and one electoral vote short of a tie.
JP is too clever by half. The name on my ballot by which I put my mark was Barack Obama, not the list of five New Mexico electors pledged to vote for him on 12/15. So yes, I did vote for Obama, along with almost 70 million other people.
Good to see the high turnout, though I really expected it to be #1.
-- Cris
My site: Obama Wallpaper Archive
Would someone be so kind as to point me to where the vote number came from? If not, would you include the vote for McCain and Other so I can play in my sandbox with the arithmetic? I get a silly pleasure out of this. So far, the best number I could find was in Dave Leip's Atlas and it's still at 68,115,828!
Thanks.
To the person who thinks we should stop counting, bear in mind it's a small compensation for almost 8 years of torture to keep seeing the numbers grow.
As some have noted - this is probably better using a somewhat more appropriate denominator. Using Professor McDonald's "Voting Eligible Population" numbers, the percentage of possible voters who voted for each President is
'64 Johnson 38.32
'56 Eisenhower 34.52
'52 Eisenhower 34.50
'72 Nixon 34.11
'84 Reagan 33.62
'08 Obama 32.26
'60 Kennedy 31.71
'04 GW Bush 30.49
'88 GHW Bush 28.93
'80 Reagan 27.77
'76 Carter 27.45
'68 Johnson 26.72
'00 GW Bush 26.63
'92 Clinton 26.09
'96 Clinton 25.91
'48 Truman 25.87
NOTE: I cannot find equivalent numbers prior to '48 quickly on McDonald's website - so leave out all elections FDR and earlier. The Voting Eligible Population data for 1948 -2000 comes from a 2001 published article, while the data from '04 and '08 is live off his website - so if there are changes in methodology between 2001 and now, that is reflected in the '04 and '08 numbers - but not the ones previous.
The difference in ranking does show that the choice of the denominator matters quite a bit.
wv: holinat - what you see of Nate on a holiday.
I am convinced that race & name had a strong impact on the final result. Had PEBO been the same man, named Tom Brown with white skin, I feel certain the percentage of the total vote would have been substantially higher. I take into account that the hypothetical PE Tom Brown would have probably not received so many AA votes, & maybe a few less Hispanic votes, but given the state of the economy, I think the white male vote would have been sky high.
i just hope someone can prove me wrong
It would be interesting to compare the closeness of each race by adding two columns to your chart:
losing candidate
percentage
@Don
Thanks for the post.....
but it was Nixon, not Johnson, who was elected President in '68....
@susan:
I know Wikipedia is not the final authority, but their 2008 election results appear to be reasonable and contain higher numbers than Leip's Election Atlas.
wv: whineca: sounds heard from the Napa Valley?
@djs04 - Whoops. The figure is correct for Nixon's win in '68 - I just tried recalling Presidents by memory, and apparently I am repressing some things about the Presidency from '68 to '72.
For my encore, watch me refer to Senator Ned Lamont (D - CT).
@Paul from Santa Fe: You didn't vote for Barack Obama, you voted for a slate of electors pledged to Barack Obama.
See: The Electoral College: How It Works in Contemporary Presidential Elections, Congressional Research Service, The Library of Congress.
Until the electoral college is abolished you'll never be able to vote directly for a presidential candidate and all the hoopla regarding the "popular vote" is just a sideshow and a distraction. Of course, it would be a pain to have a site called "threehundredthreemillioneighthundredtwentyfourthousandsixhundredfourty.com", but that would be a small price to pay for true popular democracy in presidential elections.
Clearly you can only compare elections after the 1965 voting rights act to elections before it by comparing "eligible" voters, and excluding most Blacks.
Don's list is far more useful and meaningful than the one Nate has included:
As some have noted - this is probably better using a somewhat more appropriate denominator. Using Professor McDonald's "Voting Eligible Population" numbers, the percentage of possible voters who voted for each President is
'64 Johnson 38.32
'56 Eisenhower 34.52
'52 Eisenhower 34.50
'72 Nixon 34.11
'84 Reagan 33.62
'08 Obama 32.26
'60 Kennedy 31.71
'04 GW Bush 30.49
'88 GHW Bush 28.93
'80 Reagan 27.77
'76 Carter 27.45
'68 Johnson 26.72
'00 GW Bush 26.63
'92 Clinton 26.09
'96 Clinton 25.91
'48 Truman 25.87
I'd like to second what sarasotajoe said. I would be more interested in the percentage of people eligible to vote, as in of the voting age, not a convicted felon where they can't vote, of the right race and sex where and when that was relevant, etc. listed as opposed to as a percentage of the total population.
@polls_apart: Thanks!
---
I'm with those who'd like to see eligible voter figure, even if only for this election; it might be impossible to get figures for comparison with previous elections.
oops, Cugel already did that, wow!
Talk about a complete electoral mandate
Extrapolation? Why not interpolation?
And I think your audience might be able to follow a method beyond linear, if that would change the results significantly. Spline interpolation would be the obvious choice, but I imagine someone has dobe a nice fit of these population data with a harmonic/exponential basis set.
70 million is out of the question. Obama will top out at around 69.3 McCain at 60.0 or maybe just a little below that.
Cool table.
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