Voting and voter data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau since 1964 can contain many surprises. These data explain who votes, how voting has changed over time, and why some people avoid the polls. In 2020, approximately 154.6 million Americans voted, and a record 69.4 percent of those voters cast their ballots before Election Day or by mail. Veterans, homeowners, people with a bachelor's degree, and citizens aged 65 to 74 had some of the highest reported voter turnout rates in the 2020 presidential election.

Jump to:

When the United States prepared to elect its first president, no other candidate was more respected than the immensely popular American Revolutionary War General George Washington. In both the 1788–1789 and 1792 presidential elections, Washington earned 100 percent of the electoral votes. However, in the presidential elections that followed, rivalries, disagreements, and differing ideas about the direction our nation should follow frequently led to bitterly contested votes and surprising outcomes.

Some of the United States' most prominent statesmen, influential personalities, and eloquent orators lost closely contested elections that took days or weeks to finally decide. For example, Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson lost the 1796 election to John Adams before he was elected president in 1800 and reelected in 1804. In 1824, Andrew Jackson (Page 1 / Page 2) received the most popular votes and the most electoral votes among the candidates, but lacked a majority. As a result, the U.S. House of Representatives selected John Quincy Adams as president as required by the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Jackson returned four years later to defeat Adams in 1828, and won a landslide victory against Henry Clay in 1832. William Jennings Bryan lost the 1896 and 1900 presidential elections to William McKinley and the 1908 contest to William H. Taft despite being considered one of the most skilled debaters and passionate orators in American history. Four decades later, Harry S. Truman surprised many Americans—including Republican challenger Thomas E. Dewey and analysts at the Chicago Tribune (see photo below)—to win the 1948 presidential election. More recently, incumbent President George H.W. Bush lost the 1992 presidential election despite enjoying approval ratings that reached approximately 90 percent following the United States' victory in Operation Desert Storm.

If more than 230 years of politics in the United States and the examples provided below can teach us anything, it is that a single vote can make a huge difference in national, state, or local politics. Political contests have been closely watched, unpredictable, and often contentious events since our nation's founding and will continue to shape the experiences of the American electorate.

You can learn more about some of our nation's fascinating candidates and election surprises using Census Bureau data and records. For example: 

• Controversial presidential elections are not a recent phenomenon. The outcome of the 1800 presidential election was so ardently contested that it was decided by the U.S. House of Representatives. The Democratic-Republican Party ticket of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr received the most electoral votes, while incumbent Federalist President John Adams and his running mate Charles C. Pinckney finished behind them in the electoral vote count. However, Jefferson and Burr each received the same number of electoral votes, creating a tie for president. Under these circumstances, the U.S. House of Representatives selected the president, while the candidate receiving the second-highest number of electoral votes became vice president under the original Electoral College system. After 35 unsuccessful House ballots, a 36th ballot finally elected Jefferson as president, with Burr becoming vice president. In the election's aftermath, Congress passed, and the states ratified, the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, requiring the Electoral College to cast separate votes for president and vice president, thus ending the practice of awarding the presidency to the candidate with the most electoral votes and the vice presidency to the runner-up.
  
• Victoria Woodhull became the first woman nominated for president by a national political party when the Equal Rights Party selected her in 1872, with Frederick Douglass named as her vice-presidential running mate despite declining the nomination. Douglass did not campaign for the ticket or acknowledge the nomination, and Woodhull was unable to vote for herself because she had been arrested the day before the election for publishing an "obscene" account of an affair between minister and social reformer Henry Ward Beecher and Brooklyn Women's Club founder Elizabeth Richards Tilton. Woodhull's Equal Rights Party received few votes and no electoral votes, but women's suffrage activists Susan B. Anthony and Virginia Minor gained notoriety attempting to vote in the election. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually heard Minor's suit against the St. Louis, Missouri, registrar of voters and ruled in Minor v. Happersett on March 29, 1875, that citizenship did not automatically grant women the right to vote. As a result, women's suffrage was not constitutionally protected nationwide until ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on August 18, 1920.
• Splitting the Republican vote with Progressive "Bull Moose Party" candidate Theodore Roosevelt, President William H. Taft lost the 1912 presidential election to Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson in one of the largest defeats of an incumbent president in U.S. history, receiving just 24 percent of the popular vote and 8 electoral votes. In his characteristically optimistic concession, Taft stated that "No one candidate was ever elected ex-President by such a large majority."
• Eugene Debs was the Socialist Party of America's candidate for president in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. During the 1912 election, Debs received 6 percent of the popular vote and, in Florida, placed second behind Woodrow Wilson and ahead of Republican candidate William H. Taft. Eight years later, Debs's candidacy earned the highest number of votes for a Socialist Party candidate—897,704—despite campaigning from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. Two years earlier, Debs had been found guilty under the Espionage Act of 1917, as amended by the Sedition Act of 1918, following a June 16, 1918, speech in Canton, Ohio, in which he urged Americans to resist the military draft during World War I. Debs was sentenced to 10 years and lost his voting rights under Indiana law. President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence to time served on December 25, 1921.
• Some presidential elections have been decided by a very small number of popular and/or electoral votes and the candidate receiving the most popular votes does not always become president. In the 1960 presidential election between John F. Kennedy (D) and Richard M. Nixon (R), Kennedy won the popular vote by just 0.17 percent. Nixon won 26 states compared to Kennedy's 22 states, but Kennedy prevailed with 303 electoral votes. The 1876 presidential election was even closer, with Republican Rutherford B. Hayes losing the popular vote to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden by approximately 3 percentage points; however, Hayes defeated Tilden by a single electoral vote to become president. More recently, Democratic candidate Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election to Republican George W. Bush despite winning the popular vote by approximately 540,000 votes. In 2016, Republican Donald Trump won the Electoral College and presidency, but Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by approximately 2.8 million.
• On July 1, 1971, the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, lowering the legal voting age from 21 to 18. The U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey estimated that there were more than 11.9 million 18- to 20-year-olds in the United States in 2019. If this age cohort voted as a group for a single candidate, they could have affected the outcome of many presidential elections since the amendment's ratification. Only Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 have achieved popular vote margins exceeding 10 million since 18-year-olds gained the right to vote.
• In the case of a tie, some elections have been decided by games of chance. Bryce Edgmon, who represents the 37th Congressional District in Alaska's House of Representatives (which includes portions of the Kodiak Island Borough, Aleutians East Borough, Lake and Peninsula Borough, Bristol Bay Borough, and the Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area), won the tied 2006 Democratic primary by a September 25, 2006, coin toss. Similarly, a tied election in the 1990 Illinois House of Representatives election between candidates in the state's 55th District was initially decided by a coin toss at the State of Illinois Building in Chicago, but the Illinois Supreme Court later overturned the tie-breaking toss.
• Every vote really does matter! A tied vote in the 1980 New Hampshire 16th District Republican Senate Primary could have been avoided if incumbent Frank Wageman had not been hospitalized and unable to cast a ballot. The tie was broken in Concord, New Hampshire, using numbered balls in a bottle. When Wageman's ball came out of the bottle first, he was declared the winner of the primary. (His challenger, Eleanor Podles, returned in 1982 to defeat Wageman.) Other 1-vote elections included the 2010 race for the House of Representatives seat for Vermont's Windsor-Orange-1 District, the 1986 Vermont House of Representatives Chittenden 7-4 District election, and the 1982 New Hampshire Senate District 8 race.
• Since 1964, only three presidential elections have seen more than 60 percent of the voting-age population cast ballots, including the 1964 election between Democratic incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson and Republican Barry Goldwater, the 1968 election between Republican Richard M. Nixon and Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey, and the 1972 election between incumbent Republican Richard M. Nixon and Democrat George McGovern.
• President Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1936 presidential election in one of the greatest landslide victories in American history, winning 60.8 percent of the popular vote and 523 (98.5 percent) of the electoral votes to defeat Republican challenger Alfred M. Landon. Forty-eight years later, President Ronald Reagan defeated Democratic candidate Walter Mondale with 58.8 percent of the popular vote and a record 525 (97.6 percent) of the electoral votes.
• "Third-party" candidates can disrupt elections and draw votes away from more popular candidates, but they have never won a presidential election in the United States. H. Ross Perot won 18.9 percent of the popular vote—a record for an independent candidate—in the 1992 presidential election that saw Democrat William J. Clinton defeat incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush. Despite the strong showing at the polls, Perot did not receive any electoral votes. Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt received 88 electoral votes in the 1912 presidential election against Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson and Republican nominee William H. Taft; Southern Democratic candidate John C. Breckinridge won 72 electoral votes in 1860 against Abraham Lincoln, Democrat Stephen Douglas, and fourth-party Constitutional Union candidate John Bell (who won 39 electoral votes); and American Independent candidate George Wallace won more than 9.9 million popular votes (13.5 percent) and 46 electoral votes in the 1968 presidential election pitting him against Republican Richard M. Nixon and Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey.

Since 1964, the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS) has collected data on reported voting and registration during election years and later provides estimates by turnout, age, race, and Hispanic origin.

In 2018, CPS data showed that 49 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older reported voting in the midterm election, representing nearly 122.3 million people. During the 2016 presidential election, 56 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older reported voting, representing more than 137.5 million people.

Since the 1980s, women have reported higher voting rates than men in nearly every election. In the 1980 and 1984–2018 elections, women's voting rates ranged from a high of 62.3 percent in 1992 (compared with 60.2 percent of men) to a low of 39.6 percent in 2014 (compared with 37.2 percent of men).