Data story · Elections
How to read a century of presidential elections in colour.
Draw every state’s result as one band of colour, west to east, and a presidential election becomes a strip you can read at a glance. Four strips are enough to see a century of American politics turn itself inside out.
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 election and each band is one state, running west to east: the West Coast on the left, then the Mountain West, the Plains, the Midwest, the South, and the Northeast ending in Maine on the right. 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.
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, Hawaii, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Washington, D.C. are left out.
Era one: a blue South, whatever happened elsewhere
- Republican
- Close
- Democratic
For the first half of the century the South voted Democratic in good years and bad. Even in a Republican landslide the right-centre of the strip is a solid blue block, and the Northeast at the far right is among the reddest parts of the map. That block is the fastest way to date an old strip.
The turn: a red stripe in a blue landslide
- Republican
- Close
- Democratic
In 1964 the colours swap ends. The Northeast turns deep blue and the Deep South, which had been the bluest stretch of every strip, turns red. When did the South flip? follows that change election by election.
Today: blue coasts, red middle
- Republican
- Close
- Democratic
A modern strip is blue at both ends and red in between, with a few near-white bands in the Midwest and around Pennsylvania where the result was within a point or two. It is roughly the 1920 strip turned inside out: the Northeast and the South have traded colours.
Close or lopsided, at a glance
The overall look tells you how one-sided a year was. A landslide is nearly one colour from end to end; a close election is pale, with band after band decided by a few points.
- Republican
- Close
- Democratic
The deep blue run here is the South voting for a Southerner, the last time the right-centre looks like that. The biggest landslides and the closest elections each have their own page.
What is not on the strips. A strip shows each state equally, whatever its size, so it shows how states voted, not electoral votes. It measures the Democrat against the Republican only: third-party candidates such as Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 or George Wallace in 1968 get no colour of their own, and where a major-party nominee was missing from a state’s ballot the band is left neutral.
Huezle shows you one election strip at a time and asks which year it is. Try reading one.
Download on the App StoreFree on iPhoneQuestions
Why are the states in this order?
They run west to east, with each region kept together, so a strip reads like the map from left to right. Sorting by longitude alone would scatter the South, and the South’s flip is the clearest pattern of the century.
Where does the data come from?
Each state’s result for each election, from Wikipedia’s results-by-state tables. Every year is checked against known results before it is used.
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 century; a red South with blue at both ends means recent decades.
More guides
- 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 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.
- 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.
- Election night trivia: read the election from its colours.Presidential election trivia for election night: four quick rounds built on real elections drawn as strips of colour, one band per state. How many can you get?
Now try naming one yourself.
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