Fun Election Facts for the Kids

David Weigel | November 6, 2008

- The biggest Libertarian vote total in the nation, and the biggest ever, was given to John Monds, a candidate for the Public Service Commission in Georgia. At the moment he's won 1,056,225 votes, which, unfortunately, means he loses 67-33 percent.

- Barack Obama's historic summit with Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher happened in Lucas County, Ohio. Obama carried the county 65-34 over John McCain.

- There are three states where John McCain outperformed George W. Bush: Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee. The rest either matched their 2004 margins or broke for Obama.

- About one in nine Montana voters who decided their votes in the last week went for Ron Paul.

- Alan Keyes Party candidate Alan Keyes got around 30,000 votes in California, just ahead of Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, who lives in California.

- If you subtract the other candidates and read California like a rematch between Obama and Keyes (the two Illinois U.S. Senate candidates in 2004), Obama wins 99.5 percent to 0.5 percent.

- Cindy Sheehan got 17 percent of the vote in her race against Nancy Pelosi.

- States where Bob Barr came in third place: Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas. States where the Barr vote total is bigger than the gap between Obama and McCain: Indiana and North Carolina. [Corrected: Did the math wrong earlier.]

- Hillary Clinton won 21 states in the primaries if you count the contested Florida and Michigan contests. Obama beat McCain in 13 of these states. (I bring this up because I remember being on Clinton campaign conferences calls where it was argued that only Clinton could take these states.)

- As Matthew Yglesias notes, almost all of the areas where McCain dramatically outperformed Bush were in Appalachia. Arkansas and Oklahoma are just as striking.