History · President, 1976–2024

When Third Parties Could Have Decided

In 1992, votes for candidates other than the two major-party nominees outnumbered the winning margin in forty-nine of the fifty states; in 2024, in two of fifty

Each column is a presidential election; each chip a state where the votes for every candidate other than the two major-party nominees added up to more than the gap between those two. In those states the others' votes exceeded the margin: enough, had they gone the other way together, to have changed the result. Below, the same count for Senate and governor races.

Swipe the chart sideways to see all of it.

How to read it. More than the margin is a measure of size, not a claim that those voters would otherwise have voted for the loser: they might have split, or stayed home. Washington, D.C., is left out. In the lower rows, a race counts only when both a Democrat and a Republican ran and one of them won; the margin there is between the two of them.

Source. MIT Election Data and Science Lab, U.S. President 1976–2024 (each nominee's votes on every ballot line); Senate and governor results as recorded by FutureBallot, November round, from 2004. Drawn November 2, 2026, 2:36 AM Pacific.

Link to this chartChart image pageDownload the data (CSV)Free to republish with credit to FutureBallot.