Explore a comprehensive archive of US presidential election data

See the results of all 59 presidential elections from 1789 to 2024

This interactive tool lets users explore the outcomes of every US presidential election from George Washington's uncontested 1789 victory through 2024, showing how electoral votes, state results, and shifting coalitions shaped each race.

How political campaigns use your data

What do campaigns know about US voters, and how do they use that information to shape their strategies during elections? US political campaigns base their strategies and tactics on data collected from more than 200 million voting-age Americans. This visualization by Reuters breaks down how data firms create national databases of voter files, collecting information from a variety of sources to create detailed voter profiles and how political campaigns use that data.

Understand the US electorate demographics

Ever wonder how much of each group make up the American voting bloc? Find raw data from the '16 and '18 elections broken out by a variety of factors (click on "validated voters database" link).

How Americans have voted throughout history

From shouting candidates’ names, to hanging chads to electronic scanning, the nature of voting has a long, sometimes bumpy history in the United States. See descriptions and images in chronological order with this digestible timeline.

A primary source timeline of US history (1600-1968)

Compiled by the Library of Congress, this archive walks through important events in US history through civil rights era, while providing primary sources to explore.

Election 101 podcast

What’s actually at stake when someone casts their vote in a US election? CNN’s “Election 101” podcast series provides ten episodes summarizing some of the basics of democratic elections. The ins and outs of voting are highlighted in 15-minute episodes on voter registration and voting by mail. Additional segments highlight how the electoral system works, how ballots are counted, the Electoral College, why it takes so long to get election results, and more.

See a visual history of the State of the Union

This gallery offers a visual archive of the State of the Union, featuring photographs from each president's address, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Explore decades of presidential moments, settings, and historical context tied to the annual speech.

Explore 'The Presidents' collection

PBS's "The Presidents" collection profiles America's leaders through award-winning documentaries, interviews, and archival footage. The series captures how each president reflected the nation's values, crises, and culture while shaping the office's power and legacy.

Explore data on every US county with this interactive

The Community Explorer is an interactive tool that brings the power of big data and machine learning to the equity-related policy discussion. Search by economic profile and county and see the country from a different lens.

The worst election polling fails in US history

Presidential pollsters in the US have had some embarrassing failures. Here’s a catalog of those miscalls, from the scholar who literally wrote the book on them.

Visualize energy sources and uses across the US

Want to understand the basics of America’s current energy situation? The National Academies, advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine, provides objective information about the United States’ current energy sources and uses, as well as a look forward to the future of energy.

Visualize every time Congress has mentioned the word 'democracy' since 1880, and why

This Pudding interactive analyzes every mention of "democracy" in the Congressional Record over 145 years, charting how the word shifted from a partisan label to a concept, and tracking when lawmakers warned the system itself was under threat.

Latest polls on the 2024 Presidential election

The latest polls for the 2024 Presidential Election. Updated daily, includes state and national polls for every matchup, including Biden, Harris, Trump, and DeSantis.

Nineteenth-century, hand-drawn infographics on US slavery and race

In the second half of the 19th century, researchers studying the behavior of the millions of emancipated Americans after the Civil War used "information graphics" to cut through the noise of racially charged debate. In this collection from Stanford, you can see century-old, stunningly hand-drawn data visualizations showing racial demographics, the effects of emancipation on cotton prices, and more.

A 1960s effort came close to abolishing the Electoral College

This podcast episode examines the closest attempts in US history to eliminate the Electoral College, focusing on a major 1960s reform push—and why, despite broad support, it ultimately failed.

See a census of college students dating back to 1850

The first mention of college students in census surveys dates back to 1850, when officials realized a sizeable proportion of Americans lived on campus. More modern data from the National Center for Education Statistics capture the growth in the student population, with a breakdown beginning at the end of World War II with gender and type-of-institution data.

Explore biographies of every justice who has served on the Supreme Court

This archive traces the whole history of the Supreme Court of the United States through detailed biographies of every justice, outlining their backgrounds, appointments, and the legal eras and decisions they helped shape.

Search this digital archive of 19th-century "panoramic" maps of US and Canadian cities

The panoramic map was a popular cartographic form used to depict U.S. and Canadian cities and towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You can peruse a gallery of almost 2,000 of them in this digital archive from the Library...

Modern prediction markets started in Iowa in 1988

The University of Iowa's Iowa Electronic Markets were introduced during the 1988 US presidential election. The beginning of their origin story almost sounds like a joke: Three economists walked into a bar.

A free archive of firsthand historical documents from explorers of America

Maintained by the Wisconsin Historical Society, the American Journeys collection contains more than 18,000 pages of primary source documents—journals, letters, maps, and accounts written between roughly 1000 CE and the early 1800s. These include eyewitness records of the Norse arrival in North America, Spanish conquistador expeditions, and the Lewis and Clark journey. Browse this list of highlights where pages from the original texts are specified (clicking a link opens a PDF).

A quick overview of Santa Barbara

The central California city with the year-round Mediterranean climate weaves a fascinating history of indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and then US history. This three-minute overview touches on the city's layered story, distinct architecture, and many celebrities.

Breaking down the gubernatorial races

Thirty-six states are holding gubernatorial races this November. Here's a breakdown of which states are holding elections, who is running, and which way the race is leaning.

Explore an interactive history of Google search trends

This interactive allows users to browse for the most searched topics on Google Search since 1999 and provides noteworthy statistics. Topics are sorted by categories, including athletes, movies, reality TV, dog breeds, and sauces.

Visualizing California's wine production

While Europe has France, Italy, and Spain, the US has California. The bulk of US wine production takes place in the Golden State, accounting for roughly two-thirds of the United States’ nearly 800 million gallons produced each year. This chart compares California and United States wine production from 1995 through 2022. Production in both has been trending down for several years, partially due to extreme weather events.

Explore an interactive map of battles from the American Revolution, along with detailed summaries of each engagement

Visualize the path of every solar eclipse from 1900 to 2099 and see what each looks like when observed from different locations on Earth.

Many scholars consider the first commercial radio broadcast to be during the 1920 presidential election

On Nov. 2, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, station KDKA broadcast the results of the presidential election. Leo Rosenberg delivered the news that Warren Harding had won in a landslide to an audience of around 100 people.

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

Calculate how much of your tax dollars go to each federal program based on your income, filing status, and number of children

Despite being favored by 87% of Americans, Congress does not have term limits.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

The United States has had a tumultuous relationship with Cuba since its 1959 revolution, highlighted by a nuclear crisis and a decades-long trade embargo.

While the first exchange-traded fund (a 'basket' of different assets that can be bought and sold on a stock exchange) in the US only launched in 1993, the global ETF market has grown to more than $10T in the short time since.

44% of Americans say they pray at least once a day—discover how your state's religiosity stacks up against the rest of the country.

Scientists can determine Earth's past climate conditions by analyzing air trapped in microscopic bubbles within ice cores—columns of compressed snow layers that build up over hundreds of thousands of years.

See how each of the more than two million known species relates to each other—and to common ancestors—in this zoomable tree of life.

Explore the archaeological treasures of Pompeii, the city buried under volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

See 33 images that became central to huge scandals, including a young Charles and Camilla, Michael Jackson's baby on a hotel balcony, and Hugh Grant's mugshot.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

Discover the catastrophic consequences of a failure of the US electrical grid—something that is more likely than many Americans think.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

Explore what it's like inside a patient isolation unit, used in situations such as treating a patient or suspected patient with Ebola.