khgiddon / elections-flip-margin

elections-flip-margin

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 sources

Data are taken from two sources and compiled into the /data folder:

1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Data and Science Lab provides state-level returns by year. Data is downloadable as a .tab file.
2. 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.