Every House of Representatives Election

Electing the House of Electives is a new interactive data visualization of every House of Representatives election since before the Civil War. The map allows you to explore the historical swings of political power at both the national level and, closer to home, at the regional level.

The interactive map is easy to navigate. You can view the election results for any year simply by selecting a year from the timeline beneath the map. This timeline also acts as a chart showing the number of Republican and Democrat representatives elected in each election. The map itself is colored to show which party won in each district. If you click on a district on the map you can view the name of the winning representative and the percentage of their vote.

The map allows you to switch between a choropleth and a cartogram view. The cartogram view provides a better picture of the political balance across the population as it more accurately visualizes the urban vote which is under-represented in the choropleth view.

Electing the House of Electives was created by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond and the Department of History at Virginia Tech. The data for the maps comes from a number of sources. This data can be downloaded from Virginia Tech.