2020 Presidential Election, Ranked against America’s Closest Elections

How close was the 2020 presidential election? It has been difficult to disentangle this question from the arguments of Donald Trump partisans who contend the election was stolen and Joe Biden partisans focused on the national popular vote. But in comparing presidential elections over time, the real question is: What would it have taken to go the other way? In comparative terms, defying the pattern for incumbent reelection contests, only a handful of the 58 previous presidential elections were closer than this one.

Let’s rank the 15 closest elections in American history since the beginning of popular voting in 1828. While there are a few different numerical ways to do this, there is no single quantitative metric that captures all the variables, for reasons that will be obvious as we walk through the examples. “Cumulative margin” here means the percentage margin in the decisive states, added together if there is more than one state. “Closeness rating” is my effort to create a rough metric combining the margin per million votes and the cumulative margin (I then multiplied by 150,000 to avoid having these numbers run into eye-squinting fractions).

How close was the 2020 presidential election? It has been difficult to disentangle this question from the arguments of Donald Trump partisans who contend the election was stolen and Joe Biden partisans focused on the national popular vote. But in comparing presidential elections over time, the real question is: What would it have taken to go the other way? In comparative terms, defying the pattern for incumbent reelection contests, only a handful of the 58 previous presidential elections were closer than this one.

Let’s rank the 15 closest elections in American history since the beginning of popular voting in 1828. While there are a few different numerical ways to do this, there is no single quantitative metric that captures all the variables, for reasons that will be obvious as we walk through the examples. “Cumulative margin” here means the percentage margin in the decisive states, added together if there is more than one state. “Closeness rating” is my effort to create a rough metric combining the margin per million votes and the cumulative margin (I then multiplied by 150,000 to avoid having these numbers run into eye-squinting fractions).