← All postsNovember 6, 2026

Every American Election, Mapped

Most election maps are maps of land. Land doesn't vote.

Wyoming covers about 97,000 square miles and has one House seat. New York City covers about 300 square miles and has parts of about a dozen. On an ordinary map, Wyoming looks like the bigger political prize. It isn't, and a country colored in that way looks more lopsided than it is.

So the first map here gives every House seat one hexagon of the same size, grouped by state. Each seat represents roughly the same number of people, so the shape comes from population and not from acreage. The second map keeps the real geography, including the actual district lines for each year, so you can compare the two and see how much of the picture came from land. The third covers state government: legislatures, governors and which party holds all of it.

It runs from the first federal elections in 1788 to this week, which is 120 elections and every seat plan the country has used. Change the year and states appear, seat counts shift, and parties come and go. Federalists and Whigs are here too, with a note on what each one stood for.

Nothing is filled in by guesswork. If there's no record for a seat, it's hatched and marked as missing. The 2026 results are still being counted, so anything not yet called is patterned and shows who is ahead right now. That isn't a forecast.

Loading the maps…

How to read it

By population. One hexagon per House seat. For the Senate, each state's hexagons are split into two halves, one per senator, so small states don't get extra area. For president, each state takes its winner's color, except that Maine and Nebraska can split by district. For governor, each state shows whoever held the office after that November's election.

By land. The same offices on a conventional map. House mode draws that year's real districts. A state whose members were elected statewide is drawn as one shape, split in color if they came from different parties. An at-large seat in a state that also had districts has no shape of its own, and a few dense city districts are too small to draw at this scale, so those are listed under the map.

State government. Which party held each state's house and senate, the governor, and whether one party held all three (a trifecta). Nebraska has one officially nonpartisan chamber, so it stays neutral.

Every map shows the position after that election. If a Senate seat or governor wasn't on the ballot that year, it's shown faded with whoever held it. A dot marks a seat that changed party.

Changes after the election. Members die, leave and switch parties between elections. Those changes don't recolor the map, which stays as the Congress opened. "Who came and went" lists them for each year, and a seat's details show its own. Reasons such as "resigned" or "expelled" come from Wikipedia, because the other records don't state them. Where no reason could be matched, a note just says the member left.

Year notes. Years with a dot in the picker had a big change, such as a new census or a state joining. Open "What changed" to read it. Select a party in the legend for what it stood for.

Zoom into a state. Click or tap a state or seat and a closer map of that state opens below the main one. For the House it shows that state's districts, with vote totals for 2022 and 2024. For president, Senate and governor it shows counties, shaded darker for a wider margin, for 2022 and 2024. For state legislatures it shows each district's result from 1968 to 2016, drawn on a map for 2012 to 2016. Other years say what's available. County totals are added up from precinct returns and checked against each state's result. A race whose totals don't match is left out.

Sharing and keyboard. The address updates as you go, so you can send someone the exact map you're looking at, including the state you zoomed into. The left and right arrow keys step through the years, the space bar plays and pauses, and "Find a state" works without touching the map.

Places to start

How it was built

The results come from official and academic sources where they exist and are checked against totals where a check exists.

  • House: the rosters come from member records. From the 1926 election on, party totals match the Clerk of the House's table in 43 of 50 elections. The other seven (1928, 1936, 1944, 1956, 1960, 1978 and 1984) differ by one or two seats. In all seven, the Clerk's own election reports name the same winner as the map in every seat, so the gap is in how seats were counted, not in who won. Four have a likely cause, such as a seat that changed hands on a later contest. The other three aren't explained. Before 1926 the records usually land within a few seats of the Clerk's totals, but they are not reconciled seat by seat. Party labels from that period are often disputed, so treat a single early seat with some caution.
  • Elected but never seated: a few members won and then died or left before their Congress opened. Where the replacement was from another party, as in Alaska in 1972, the map shows the winner and lists the change.
  • Senate: seats are tracked by state and class. From 1926 on, party totals fit the Senate's own table in 49 of 50 elections. The exception is 1954, off by one. The table counts opening day, so a winner sworn in late can fill a seat it lists as vacant. Margins are available from 1976.
  • President: each state's electoral votes add up to the National Archives total for every election. Faithless electors are in a footnote and don't change a state's color. The popular vote, nationally and for each state, is shown from 1976, from the MIT Election Lab's returns. Earlier popular vote totals are in a dataset that needs a login, so they aren't shown.
  • Governors and state legislatures: these are the weakest part. Before 1937 they rest on Wikipedia and the National Governors Association, with no independent check. Where Wikipedia and the academic data overlap, they agree about 97% of the time, so expect some errors in the years that rely on Wikipedia alone. State races have no single official record, so before 1937 and after 2011 they use the earliest source that could be found, and a note under the map says so.
  • House margins are not shown. The dataset that has them couldn't be downloaded by script.
  • 2026 is a snapshot as of November 6, 2026, and will change as races are called. It carries an asterisk in the year picker until results are certified. State legislative results for 2026 aren't in yet, so chambers on the ballot show as no data. Chambers with no seats up this year (in Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey and Virginia, and the state senates of Kansas, New Mexico and South Carolina) keep their current make-up and are faded.

Sources

Sources were retrieved on November 6, 2026, unless noted. Election results are facts drawn from the sources below. The maps, layouts and party notes here are Terran Foundry's own work. Any mistakes in processing the data are ours, not the sources'.

US government records (public domain)

Academic and open datasets

Other sources