You've seen this map before.
The edges are blue, the middle is red,
and everyone is mad at Florida.
But it hasn't always been that way.
New parties have come and gone.
New states expanded the map,
then shifted from the left to right and back again.
And who was allowed to vote
has transformed this map over the last 231 years.
Here's how the US has voted
in every presidential election since 1789.
Thirteen years after the signing
of the Declaration of Independence,
George Washington is elected
the first president of the union in 1789.
He easily wins a second term.
But only about 1.3%
of the country's population casts a ballot.
In most states,
only white men who own property
can vote, with some exceptions.
Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Hampshire,
Massachusetts, Vermont all allowed
free people of color to vote
in exactly the same basis
as their white neighbors, and without property requirements.
The birth of our two-party system
includes the Federalists, who favor financial interests,
and the Democratic-Republicans, who favor farmers.
The election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800
initiates nearly 40 years
of Democratic-Republican presidential dominance.
In 1824, four Democratic-Republicans
run against each other in a race so close
it's decided by the House of Representatives,
who chooses John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson.
Four years later, Jackson runs again.
By then, many states have eliminated property requirements,
and voter participation almost doubles.
Jackson rallies white working class voters
to fight Washington elitism.
He wins in a landslide.
And some of it is on the basis of economic populism.
Some of it is on the basis
of inveterate racist policies
towards Native American nations.
Some of it is on the basis of kind of friendliness
and accommodation to slavery.
Jackson wins again in 1832,
and a new business-friendly opposition party comes together.
They call themselves the Whigs,
and one of their major issues is fighting
the expansion of slavery into new territories.
Slavery is the one issue that is most likely
to have determined which way someone votes
throughout the first half of the 19th century,
with conservatives and liberals on both sides.
In 1836, four Whig candidates run,
but Democratic-Republican Martin Van Buren
wins the most states.
And power shifts back and forth between
the two parties for the next decade.
New states like Florida, Texas, and Iowa
expand the electoral map.
By 1856, after a string of defeats
and infighting over slavery,
the Whig party collapses.
A new Republican Party emerges
opposing slavery and calling for economic reform.
So at this point,
we have both major parties that exist today,
even though their platforms
have changed drastically since then.
The Republicans gained popularity in the North
and tried to win over free Black voters in the South.
It's not as if Republicans
are not racially discriminatory or they're not racist.
It's going to benefit them to have Black people
become a part of the franchise
and begin to vote and ideally be Republicans.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party
unifies the pro-slavery vote
and cements their hold on the south.
That divide deepens, and in 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln
wins on an anti-slavery platform.
It's really two separate elections,
one in the North and one in the South.
Lincoln isn't even on the ballot
in most of the slave states.
We might as well already be in two distinct republics
by the summer and fall of 1860.
Starting with South Carolina,
11 Southern states secede from the Union
to form the Confederacy, and the Civil War begins in 1861.
In the midst of the war, Lincoln wins a second term.
That's also the first election
where we had absentee balloting.
Lincoln wanted to make it possible
for soldiers in the field to vote
because he assumed they
would vote overwhelmingly Republican,
which in fact is what they did.
A year later, the Confederacy loses,
and Southern states begin to rejoin the union.
Lincoln is assassinated in 1865
and Vice President Andrew Johnson takes over.
Republicans hang onto power
when Ulysses S. Grant wins in 1868.
Grant signs the 15th Amendment,
giving all male citizens the right to vote,
regardless of color or race,
with the exception of Native Americans.
Grant wins again in 1872.
And the only reason Grant won a popular majority
was because there were sufficient numbers of Blacks voting.
In some southern states, 90% of African Americans voted.
In 1876, it wasn't clear which candidate won the election.
So Congress makes a deal.
Republicans get the presidency,
with Rutherford B. Hayes taking office,
and Democrats in the South get something
they've wanted since the end of the war,
the removal of federal troops
that have been protecting
the civil rights of newly freed Black people.
People couldn't vote.
People couldn't run for office.
They couldn't purchase property.
And essentially, the Hayes-Tilden
compromise in 1877 ends Reconstruction,
and we begin to move towards
what we later come to know as Jim Crow.
State and local governments passed laws
designed to keep African Americans from voting.
Democrats ride a wave of anti-Reconstruction sentiment
and dominate the South for the next century or so.
Still, in 1896, Republican William McKinley
wins by the largest margin his party has seen in 20 years.
The Republican Party basically
had become the presumptive majority party.
I mean, it was a contest basically over
kind of rural agrarianism and urban capitalism,
and the country favored Republicans.
In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt runs
as a Progressive in what he dubs the "Bull Moose" Party.
It splits the Republican vote in half,
handing the win to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Still, Roosevelt's Progressive Party
is the first with an agenda designed
to attract women suffragists.
So the agenda of Progressives
was things like food and drug legislation,
child labor legislation, factory legislation,
better education, those sorts of things.
And those are traditionally seen as women's issues.
And the Progressives understood
that if they had franchised women,
they would win more votes.
The women's movement gains momentum
through the 1910s, and states like Washington,
Oregon, and California give women the vote.
The 19th Amendment grants women
the right to vote nationwide in 1920.
But six decades passed before they turn out
at the same rate as men and form a significant voting bloc.
Women maybe turned out
at two-thirds of male voters, right.
They weren't changing the electorate in that way.
They weren't going to change it
until they started voting differently from men.
After Wilson, three Republicans win in a row,
ending with Herbert Hoover in 1928.
The economy crashes in 1929,
and public outrage over the Great Depression
helps Franklin D. Roosevelt win in 1932.
World War II collides with the end of his second term,
and the nation decides to stick with him
for an unprecedented third term,
and then a fourth term
to get them through the other side of the war.
Voter demographics and party alignment
shift during his 12-year presidency
in ways that can still be felt today.
Democrats consolidate the support
of recent immigrants and younger working-class whites
who had previously voted Republican.
New Deal Democrats begin winning over
the millions of Black people
migrating north to escape Jim Crow terror in the South.
Well, when Roosevelt first ran in 1932,
when he was first elected,
80% of African Americans
were still voting for Herbert Hoover.
The first time significant numbers
of Blacks voted Democratic
was in Franklin Roosevelt's reelection in 1936.
And that's because the New Deal
anti-poverty programs extended to African Americans.
FDR dies in 1945.
Vice President Harry S. Truman takes over
and then wins the election of 1948.
If you were a Truman voter in 1948,
what you thought you would be voting for
is in effect a third stage of the New Deal.
But in 1952, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower
ends 20 years of Democratic rule
with two landslide elections
in which he only loses the South.
Campaigning passes still another milestone.
A TV-savvy campaign leads John F. Kennedy
to victory in 1960,
the last time a winning candidate loses Ohio.
The newly popular medium forces him
and the nation to confront rampant
discrimination against Black people.
Civil rights activity in the 1960s
is being aired on television globally.
By the mid 1960s, we're involved in Vietnam.
Mass draft-card burning was urged.
The globe is seeing us every day on television
not standing by the same kinds of principles
that we argue we're bringing to other countries.
And our task, our obligation,
is to make that revolution, that change.
Civil rights bills
had been passed in 1957 and 1960,
but neither fully enfranchised Blacks in the South.
At 1:25, the motorcade moves
into the downtown area.
Death is six minutes away.
JFK is assassinated in late 1963.
Lyndon B. Johnson becomes president
and wins outright in 1964.
If we succeed,
it will not be because of what we have,
but it will be because of what we are.
He passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964
and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
meant to keep states from changing voting laws
the way they had during the Jim Crow era.
You never actually achieved equity
between the Black vote in terms
of its percentage share and the white vote,
but the improvements are substantial.
The Democrats strong civil rights push
alienates many white Southerners
who throw their support behind Republicans.
In 1968, a year of social upheaval,
Republicans pick up support in the West
and Midwest as the country shifts right.
Richard Nixon wins the election running on law and order.
What Nixon is essentially telling people
is that civil rights has gone too far.
If you elect me, you know,
I'll bring us back to a more stable system.
Nixon wins in a landslide in 1972.
Two years later, amid the Watergate scandal,
Nixon becomes the only president to ever resign.
Therefore, I shall resign the presidency
effective at noon tomorrow.
Then, in 1976, Jimmy Carter secures
the Democrats' last win for almost two decades.
Actor-turned-governor Ronald Reagan beats Carter in 1980,
revitalizing the conservative movement.
This every-four-years ceremony we accept as normal
is nothing less than a miracle.
It's hard to overstate how devastating
a defeat the 1980 election was for the Democrats.
Because if you compare 1980 to 1984,
they actually get worse.
Reagan's Vice President George H.W. Bush
wins in 1988 as the clear front-runner
with the promise to continue Reagan's policies.
But in 1992, Bill Clinton,
a southern Democratic governor,
revitalizes his party by successfully
appealing to moderate voters.
And Clinton is elected
on this platform of a kind of young, new Democrat.
Al Gore is his running mate.
The idea is that this will symbolize
a new generation of Democrats.
In 2000, Republicans rally behind
the younger George Bush, George W.,
then the governor of Texas.
Al Gore wins the popular vote,
but a controversial Supreme Court decision
gives Bush Florida, handing him the election.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks,
Bush wins again in 2004,
coming close to rebuilding Reagan's red wall.
But in 2008, during a devastating financial crisis,
Democrat Barack Obama wins in a landslide,
picking up solidly Republican states like Virginia,
and becomes the first Black president.
But on this January night,
at this defining moment in history,
you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do.
The Obama approach
is to energize the young
and essentially to appease and soothe suburban voters
who had been reliant Republican voters
in the '80s and '90s,
because basically they thought Democrats
would drive the country off the cliff economically.
After Obama wins a second term in 2012
with the same diverse coalition of voters,
Republicans do what they call an autopsy on their party.
Postmortem said we need to reach out to Latino voters,
we need to reach out to Asian voters.
But four years later,
they nominate a famed real estate baron
and reality TV star not known
for appealing to a diverse array of voters.
Donald Trump doesn't intend to build a wall.
Believe me, folks,
we're building the wall. Believe me.
And instead what Trump realized
was, maybe I could double down
on the racially resentful white people
who in each election are voting
slightly more and more Republican.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton
is the odds-on favorite
to become the first female president.
Pundits point to the blue wall of states
that had voted Democratic over the past six elections.
But that was not to be.
Very similar to the Voting Rights Act itself,
the election of Obama created a significant backlash.
I mean, the American history
is defined to some degree
by civil rights movement forward,
backlash white supremacy back.
Clinton does win the popular vote,
but Trump charges through the blue wall,
winning the electoral college
with a campaign that by and large
ignored the 2012 autopsy.
Trump's populist campaign captured swing states
like Florida, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin
that could have gone either way.
I don't know if Trump's
a political genius or not,
but he intuited something, that you
actually could squeeze another presidential victory or two
out of a racially disaffected white electorate.
Today, the experts say
the American political system
is the most polarized it's ever been.
Trump benefited from the fact
that 90% of Republicans are going to support him.
There's this phenomenon called negative partisanship,
where even if you don't love your party,
you know you hate the other side.
Leading up to the 2020 election,
a global pandemic and months of civil unrest
have left the most diverse electorate in history
firmly divided along party lines.
Fully one-third of eligible voters are nonwhite,
driven by an increase in the Hispanic population.
But questions remain around whether
people will make it to the polls,
how states will handle mail-in votes,
or when a winner can even be announced.