Seasonal guide · Elections
Election night trivia: read the election from its colours.
Waiting for results is a long evening. Here is a game for it: four quick rounds, each built on real presidential elections drawn as strips of colour. Cover the answer under each strip and see how you do.
Every strip on this page is a real Elections strip from the Huezle app, drawn by the app’s own code. More about Elections.
How to read the strips
Each strip is one presidential election. Each band is one state, running west to east, from Oregon on the left to Maine on the right, with each region kept together. A band is blue where the Democrat beat the Republican and red where the Republican won, and the deeper the colour, the bigger the margin. A near-white band is a state decided by a point or two.
Only the 45 states that voted in every election since 1900 are drawn, so every strip has the same bands in the same order. Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Washington, D.C. are left out.
A note on the date. The elections on 3 November 2026 are midterms, with no presidential race on the ballot. Everything here is a past presidential election: trivia about history, not a forecast.
Round one: spot the difference
- 2000
- 2024
- Republican
- Close
- Democratic
Answer: seven. Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania went from blue to red; Colorado, Virginia and New Hampshire went from red to blue. Everything else held. One bonus point for spotting Florida, the effectively white band of 2000, decided by 537 votes and now red by 13 points.
Round two: same score, different decade
- 1960
- 1976
- Republican
- Close
- Democratic
Answer: Rhode Island in 1960, at 27 points for John F. Kennedy, and Georgia in 1976, at 34 points for Jimmy Carter, its own former governor. Both strips are pale, with sixteen and seventeen states inside five points, so the strongest band is the quickest way to tell them apart.
Round three: the red stripe
- Republican
- Close
- Democratic
Answer: it is the Deep South — Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina — voting for Barry Goldwater, who had opposed the Civil Rights Act that year. Mississippi went Republican by 74 points. Alabama is the neutral band beside them because Lyndon Johnson was not on its ballot. When the South flipped tells the rest.
Round four: the lone holdout
- Republican
- Close
- Democratic
Answer: Minnesota, Walter Mondale’s home state, by less than a fifth of a point. Two other states, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, came within four points and still went red. More one-sided years are in the biggest landslides.
How to play it with friends
Show a strip and ask for the year: two points for the exact election, one for the right decade. The fastest clues are the South (blue before the 1960s, red after), the Northeast (red around 1900, blue today) and the number of near-white bands, which tells you how close the night was. The closest elections make a hard bonus round.
Huezle has every presidential election since 1900 as a strip. Try naming one cold.
Download on the App StoreFree on iPhoneQuestions
Is there a presidential election in 2026?
No. The election on 3 November 2026 is a midterm, for Congress, governors and other offices. The next presidential election is in 2028.
Which state was the only one Reagan lost in 1984?
Minnesota, Walter Mondale’s home state, along with Washington, D.C. Mondale held Minnesota by less than a fifth of a point.
How can you tell an old election from a recent one?
Look just right of centre. A deep blue South almost always means the first half of the twentieth century; a red South with blue at both ends means recent decades.
More guides
- How to read a century of presidential elections in colour.US presidential elections since 1900 drawn as strips of colour, one band per state from west to east. Learn to read the eras from four real strips.
- When did the South flip from Democrat to Republican?The Solid South in colour: how Southern states went from voting Democratic by 90 points to reliably Republican, told in four election strips from 1920 to 2024.
- The closest presidential elections, state by state.The most evenly fought US presidential elections since 1900 as strips of colour, and why the closest national result is not always the palest strip.
- The biggest presidential landslides, drawn in colour.Three of the most lopsided US presidential elections drawn as strips of colour, one band per state, and why each landslide holds out in a different place.
Now try naming one yourself.
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