United States Electoral College and Related Topics

President of the United States

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Head of state and head of government of the United States of America.

George Washington, the first president of the United States

President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers a radio address, 1933

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act as Martin Luther King Jr. and others look on

President Donald Trump delivers his 2018 State of the Union Address, with Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan

President George H. W. Bush and Russian President Gorbachev sign the 1990 Chemical Weapons Accord in the White House.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, successfully preserved the Union during the American Civil War.

President Barack Obama with his Supreme Court appointee Justice Sotomayor, 2009

President Ronald Reagan reviews honor guards during a state visit to China, 1984

President Woodrow Wilson throws out the ceremonial first ball on Opening Day, 1916

President Jimmy Carter (left) debates Republican nominee Ronald Reagan on October 28, 1980.

Map of the United States showing the number of electoral votes allocated following the 2010 census to each state and the District of Columbia for the 2012, 2016 and 2020 presidential elections; it also notes that Maine and Nebraska distribute electors by way of the congressional district method. 270 electoral votes are required for a majority out of 538 votes possible.

Franklin D. Roosevelt won a record four presidential elections (1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944), leading to the adoption of a two-term limit.

President William McKinley and his successor, Theodore Roosevelt

President Reagan surrounded by Secret Service

From left: George H. W. Bush, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter. Photo taken in the Oval Office on January 7, 2009; Obama formally took office thirteen days later.

Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter at the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas, 2013

The presidential limousine, dubbed "The Beast"

The presidential plane, called Air Force One when the president is on board

Marine One helicopter, when the president is aboard

The president is elected indirectly through the Electoral College to a four-year term, along with the vice president.

A 2016 general election ballot, listing the presidential and vice presidential candidates

United States presidential election

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Comparison of the popular vote totals since 1900.

The hand-written copy of the natural-born-citizen clause as it appeared in 1787

A 2008 Democratic caucus meeting in Iowa City, Iowa. The Iowa caucuses are traditionally the first major electoral event of presidential primaries and caucuses.

Madison Square Garden in New York City, the site of the 1976, 1980, and 1992 Democratic National Conventions; and the 2004 Republican National Convention.

The floor of the 2008 Republican National Convention at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

A Texas voter about to mark a selection for president on a ballot, 2008 Election Day

John Adams was the first of 26 presidents who have been lawyers.

The election of the president and the vice president of the United States is an indirect election in which citizens of the United States who are registered to vote in one of the fifty U.S. states or in Washington, D.C., cast ballots not directly for those offices, but instead for members of the Electoral College.

Vice President of the United States

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Second-highest officer in the executive branch of the U.S. federal government, after the president of the United States, and ranks first in the presidential line of succession.

John Adams, the first vice president of the United States

Though prominent as a Missouri Senator, Harry Truman had been vice president only three months when he became president; he was never informed of Franklin Roosevelt's war or postwar policies while vice president.

1888 illustration of John Tyler receiving the news of President William Henry Harrison's death from Chief Clerk of the State Department Fletcher Webster

Then-Vice President Joe Biden meets with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, 2010

Geraldine Ferraro speaks at the 1984 Democratic National Convention following her selection as the party's vice presidential nominee

Four vice presidents: (from left) outgoing president Lyndon B. Johnson (the 37th vice president), incoming president Richard Nixon (36th), (Everett Dirksen administering oath), incoming vice president Spiro Agnew (39th), and outgoing vice president Hubert Humphrey (38th), January 20, 1969

(Left to right) President Richard Nixon, First Lady Pat Nixon, Betty Ford and Congressman Gerald Ford after President Nixon nominated Congressman Ford to be vice president, October 13, 1973

{{center|Dan Quayle (1989–1993) Age {{age|1947|2|4}}}}

{{center|Al Gore (1993–2001) Age {{age|1948|3|31}}}}

{{center|Dick Cheney (2001–2009) Age {{age|1941|1|30}}}}

{{center|Joe Biden (2009–2017) Age {{age|1942|11|20}}}}

{{center|Mike Pence (2017–2021) Age {{age|1959|6|7}}}}

The vice president is indirectly elected together with the president to a four-year term of office by the people of the United States through the Electoral College.

Representation of all political parties as percentage in House of Representatives over time

United States House of Representatives

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Lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the Senate being the upper chamber.

Historical graph of party control of the Senate and House as well as the presidency

Republican speaker of the House Thomas Brackett Reed (1895–1899)

All 435 voting seats of the current House shown grouped by state, largest to smallest (From 2015)

Population per U.S. representative allocated to each of the 50 states and D.C., ranked by population. Since D.C. (ranked 49th) receives no voting seats in the House, its bar is absent.

The House also has exclusive powers: it initiates all revenue bills, impeaches federal officers, and elects the president if no candidate receives a majority of votes in the Electoral College.

Democratic Party (United States)

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One of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States.

Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States (1829–1837) and the first Democratic president.

Martin Van Buren was the eighth president of the United States (1837–1841) and the second Democratic president.

The 1885 inauguration of Grover Cleveland, the only president with non-consecutive terms

Leaders of the Democratic Party during the first half of the 20th century on 14 June 1913: Secretary of State William J. Bryan, Josephus Daniels, President Woodrow Wilson, Breckinridge Long, William Phillips, and Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, 32nd and 33rd presidents of the United States (1933–1945; 1945–1953), featured on a campaign poster for the 1944 presidential election

John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, 35th and 36th presidents of the United States (1961–1963, 1963–1969)

Jimmy Carter, 39th president of the United States (1977–1981), delivering the State of the Union Address in 1979

Bill Clinton, 42nd president of the United States (1993–2001), at The Pentagon in 1998

Barack Obama speaking to College Democrats of America in 2007

President Barack Obama meeting with the Blue Dog Coalition in the State Dining Room of the White House in 2009

Eleanor Roosevelt at the 1956 Democratic National Convention in Chicago

President Barack Obama signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law at the White House on March 23, 2010

Secretary of State John Kerry addressing delegates at the United Nations before signing the Paris Agreement on April 22, 2016

Shirley Chisholm was the first major-party African American candidate to run nationwide primary campaigns.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Immigration Act of 1965 as Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Senators Edward M. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and others look on

Then-Senator Barack Obama shaking hands with an American soldier in Basra, Iraq in 2008

President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meeting with President Barack Obama at Ben Gurion Airport in 2013

Self-identified Democrats (blue) versus self-identified Republicans (red) (January–June 2010 data)

Higher percentages of Democrats than Republicans are members of union households.

Elected at age 33, Jon Ossoff is currently the youngest member of the U.S. Senate.

Hillary Clinton was the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg

Julián Castro served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

U.S. opinion on gun control issues is deeply divided along political lines, as shown in this 2021 survey.

They support reforming the electoral system to eliminate gerrymandering, abolishing the electoral college, as well as passing comprehensive campaign finance reform.

2016 United States presidential election

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The 58th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016.

The incumbent in 2016, Barack Obama. His second term expired at noon on January 20, 2017.

Campaign signs of third-party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, October 2016 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont

A general election ballot, listing the presidential and vice presidential candidates

Trump campaigns in Phoenix, Arizona, October 29, 2016

Clinton campaigns in Raleigh, North Carolina, October 22, 2016

President Barack Obama casting his vote early in Chicago on October 7, 2016

Vote margin swing by state 2012 to 2016. Only twelve states (as well as the District of Columbia and Nebraka's 2nd congressional district) shifted more Democratic. The large swing in Utah is mostly due to the votes for third candidate Evan McMullin and the 2012 candidacy of Utah's Mitt Romney.

Final polling averages for the 2016 election by state. Polls from lightly shaded states are older than September 1, 2016.

Results by state, shaded according to winning candidate's percentage of the vote

Results by vote distribution among states. The size of each state's pie chart is proportional to its number of electoral votes.

Results by county. Red denotes counties that went to Trump; blue denotes counties that went to Clinton.

Results by county, shaded according to winning candidate's percentage of the vote

A discontinuous cartogram of the 2016 United States presidential election

A continuous cartogram of the 2016 United States presidential election

A discretized cartogram of the 2016 United States presidential election using squares

A discretized cartogram of the 2016 United States presidential election using hexagons

Results of election by congressional district, shaded by winning candidate's percentage of the vote

Results by county, shaded according to percentage of the vote for Johnson

Results by county, shaded according to percentage of the vote for Jill Stein

Results by state, shaded according to margin of victory

Trump received the majority in the Electoral College and won upset victories in the pivotal Rust Belt region, becoming the first and only Republican nominee since 1988 to win Michigan and Pennsylvania, and the first since 1984 to win Wisconsin.

Graph showing historical party control of the U.S. Senate, House and Presidency since 1855

United States Senate

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Upper chamber of the United States Congress, with the House of Representatives being the lower chamber.

Members of the United States Senate for the 117th Congress

The Senate side of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Committee Room 226 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building is used for hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Senate has the power to try impeachments; shown above is Theodore R. Davis's drawing of the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, 1868

U.S. Senate chamber c. 1873: two or three spittoons are visible by desks

If no candidate receives a majority of electors for vice president, the duty falls to the Senate to elect one of the top two recipients of electors for that office.

Page one of the officially engrossed copy of the Constitution signed by delegates. A print run of 500 copies of the final version preceded this copy.

Constitution of the United States

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Supreme law of the United States of America.

Signing of the Constitution, September 17, 1787 (1940 by Howard Chandler Christy)

Dates the 13 states ratified the Constitution

Closing endorsement section of the United States Constitution

United States Bill of Rights
Currently housed in the National Archives.

Salmon P. Chase {{refn|group= lower-alpha|The Chase Court, 1864–1873, in 1865 were Salmon P. Chase (chief Justice); Hon. Nathan Clifford, Maine; Stephen J. Field, Justice Supreme Court, U.S.; Hon. Samuel F. Miller, U.S. Supreme Court; Hon. Noah H. Swayne, Justice Supreme Court, U.S.; Judge Morrison R. Waite}}

William Howard Taft {{refn|group= lower-alpha|The Taft Court, 1921–1930, in 1925 were James Clark McReynolds, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William Howard Taft (chief justice), Willis Van Devanter, Louis Brandeis. Edward Sanford, George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, Harlan Fiske Stone}}

Earl Warren {{refn|group= lower-alpha|The Warren Court, 1953–1969, in 1963 were Felix Frankfurter; Hugo Black; Earl Warren (chief justice); Stanley Reed; William O. Douglas. Tom Clark; Robert H. Jackson; Harold Burton; Sherman Minton}}

William Rehnquist {{refn|group= lower-alpha|The Rehnquist Court, 1986–2005.}}

Foner, Eric, "The Corrupt Bargain" (review of Alexander Keyssar, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?, Harvard, 2020, 544 pp., ISBN: 978 0 674 66015 1; and Jesse Wegman, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, St Martin's Press, 2020, 304 pp., ISBN: 978 1 250 22197 1), London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 10 (21 May 2020), pp. 3, 5–6. Foner concludes (p. 6): "Rooted in distrust of ordinary citizens and, like so many other features of American life, in the institution of slavery, the electoral college is a relic of a past the United States should have abandoned long ago."

U.S. state

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Constituent political entity, of which there are currently 50.

Ownership of federal lands in the 50 states

The order in which the original 13 states ratified the Constitution, then the order in which the others were admitted to the Union

A map showing the source languages of state names

Each state is also entitled to select a number of electors (equal to the total number of representatives and senators from that state) to vote in the Electoral College, the body that directly elects the president of the United States.