Press & Media
Reporter-ready, nonpartisan stats from American election history, each with the data behind it.
PolitiFinder is a nonpartisan database of U.S. elections, built to be quoted. Below are pre-written, copy-pasteable stat lines for stories on deadline. Each one leads with the figure, names its scope, and links straight to the page where the number sits alongside every race behind it. Lift a line verbatim and link the page; that is what these are for.
Need a fact checked, or a custom number on deadline (a specific career total, a head-to-head, the record for one state)? Email press@politifinder.com and we will turn it around quickly. Please confirm any figure against its linked page before publishing; records do get broken.
Ten quotable stats
One sentence each, ready to publish. Where a line is our own calculation it says so; please keep that label when you quote it.
Five times in U.S. history a candidate has won the national popular vote but lost the presidency: Andrew Jackson (1824), Samuel Tilden (1876), Grover Cleveland (1888), Al Gore (2000) and Hillary Clinton (2016).
81,283,501 is the most votes ever cast for a U.S. presidential candidate: Joe Biden in 2020, the first to clear 80 million. Donald Trump’s 77,302,580 in 2024 ranks second.
No presidential candidate has matched Lyndon B. Johnson’s 61.1% of the national popular vote in 1964, the highest share of the popular-vote era.
Ronald Reagan’s 525 electoral votes in 1984 are the most any presidential candidate has ever won; Franklin Roosevelt’s 523 in 1936 is the only total that comes close.
The most votes ever won by a third-party or independent presidential candidate are Ross Perot’s 19.7 million in 1992 (18.9%). By vote share, Theodore Roosevelt’s 27.4% in 1912 remains the best showing.
Just 6 votes decided the closest U.S. House election of the modern era: Iowa’s 2nd District in 2020, certified for Mariannette Miller-Meeks over Rita Hart, 196,964 to 196,958.
The closest U.S. Senate race on record came down to 2 votes: New Hampshire in 1974 was so close that the Senate left the seat vacant and ordered a new election.
129 votes decided the closest governor’s race in modern U.S. history: Washington’s 2004 contest between Christine Gregoire and Dino Rossi, out of about 2.7 million cast.
The youngest U.S. senators ever elected took office at 29: Joe Biden in 1972 and Rush Holt in 1934, each elected below the Constitution’s minimum age of 30. The oldest, Strom Thurmond, won a term at 93.
By PolitiFinder’s all-office career count, which adds every presidential, Senate, governor and House vote a politician ever won, Joe Biden leads all Americans with 217,726,754, just ahead of Donald Trump’s 214,511,383.
PolitiFinder calculation. A vote for a presidential ticket counts for both the president and the running mate, the same way every profile reports its totals, so this all-office sum is our own construction rather than an external standard. The component election results are independently verifiable.
More quick stats
A deeper bench to rotate through, including timely pegs you can refresh each cycle.
Only 11 sitting presidents have ever lost re-election. Donald Trump in 2020 was the first since George H. W. Bush in 1992.
Hillary Clinton drew 2,868,686 more popular votes than the winner in 2016, the widest popular-vote margin of any losing presidential candidate.
America’s Bush dynasty has drawn a combined 314.7 million career popular votes across two presidents, two governors and a senator, a cross-generational total no other database compiles.
PolitiFinder calculation: a combined family total, summing each member’s career votes across every office.
Al Franken’s 312-vote win in Minnesota in 2008, out of nearly 2.9 million ballots, is the closest U.S. Senate race of the 21st century.
The same two presidential nominees have faced off only six times, and not since Eisenhower beat Stevenson again in 1956.
It has been 150 years since the most disputed U.S. election: in 1876 Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but a commission awarded the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes by a single electoral vote, 185 to 184.
Citing PolitiFinder
Every profile, race, and ranking has a clean, permanent URL. For a specific figure, link the page it sits on and name it. Suggested citation:
politifinder.com. Accessed [date].
For formal work, confirm the number against the primary source we list on each page. Our methodology page explains the sourcing standard, how the career and family totals are built, and how to cite the data.