CQ Press Voting and Elections Collection

The CQ Voting and Elections Collection combines data and analyses that cover presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections. There is also coverage of campaigns and elections, political parties, and voters and demographics. For background information, there is an encyclopedia as well as calendars and chronologies. In addition there is more material on topics such as the histories of offices and candidates, party control, and third parties.

Content and Features

• Election Results
• Campaigns and Elections explores the American system of voting and elections, electoral process and reform, media, interest groups, and the impact of money
• Political Parties covers the party system in America, including party strength and control, and profiles Democratic, Republican, and third parties
• Voters and Demographics covers expansion of voting rights, voter turnout, voting behavior, modern county census data, and modern district profiles
• Presidential Elections: primary (1912–present), popular (1824–present), and electoral votes (1789–present)
• House Elections: primary (1994–present) and general (1856–present)
• Senate Elections: primary (1960–present) and general (1908–present)
• Gubernatorial Elections: primary (1919–present) and general (1824–present)
• Data export tools allow for customized data downloads for easy statistical analysis.

How the Voting and Elections Collection supports research (examples):

• Use the Candidate finder and Vote counts to track a candidate’s political career and how the percentage of the vote changed in the move from challenger to incumbent. Through Vote counts, researchers can view overall trends in the total Democratic and Republican vote, for example, looking at trends in a particular state over the years to understand current elections in that state or trends in the nationwide presidential vote over the years.
• Use Elections with open seats and Landslide elections and close races to study incumbency and re-election rates, open seat races, and races based on competitiveness, for example, by looking at all candidates who won between 45 to 55% of the vote or who won over 60% of the vote.
• Use Party Control, Split Districts, and Third party candidates to analyze party control and strength in the House and to understand the impact and activity of third party candidates.
• Use House seats that changed party and Special elections to find all the changes that affect officeholders outside of the regular election cycle.

Click here to search the collection!