In United States history, 5 presidents have lost the nationwide popular vote, but still won the election: John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. In the wake of Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016, despite winning the popular vote, we saw a reawakening of the national conversation surrounding the electoral college's place in contemporary US politics.
It is important to consider these reasons when crafting your viewpoint about the electoral college vs popular vote debate. The sake of democracy and human rights might just depend on it.
Based on a dataset by the Harvard Dataverse and MIT Election Data + Science Lab, the following beeswarm chart illustrates the popular vote proportions from the 1976-2020 US presidential elections. For each election year, the top four candidates, their party, and their vote returns are displayed.
The CSV dataset is organized into rows of state party vote returns. In order to organize these rows by election year, I used Javascript Maps to efficiently group the vote returns into a multi-level data structure in which an ElectionYear class contains its top four CandidateOption class instances, which in turn each has its own accumulated array of StateVote class instances. Then I used D3.js force layouts and data joins to visualize this custom data structure into clusters.
Below, explore the popular vote proportions for yourself. Flip between the 12 available election years and hover over the circular state vote return representations to see what party and state each vote subsection is from.
The visualization not only helps to conceptualize the popular vote returns from recent elections, but it also helps track the movement in political parties over the past 5 decades.