Federal Elections Data

Candidate vote totals, campaign finance data, and voting-age population

1970 - 2015

Below are vote totals for every candidate in every federal election since 1970, complete with identifiers (UNIQUE ID) for every individual; the ID remains constant over all offices the candidate runs for over the years. This should facilitate the creation of lagged and leading election variables, a task that is otherwise difficult for House members who change district numbers constantly. ICPSR numbers, Federal Election Commission (FEC) candidate IDs (1976 to the present), and principal campaign committee IDs (1980 to present) are merged in. Voting-age population (VAP) is also available for most years and jurisdictions; this should assist in creating turnout variables. Finally, campaign receipt and spending totals are merged in from the FEC’s post-election summary files.

Vote totals were taken from the ICPSR Historical Election Series from before 1990, with erroneous totals corrected and missing elections entered by hand. General election data after 1990 was taken from the FEC election summaries; special election data was taken from various sources.

—Clifford Vickrey, 5/4/16

Download


DataEmail me and you shall receive
Data dictionary (includes column numbers)data_dictionary.txt
.do file for importing into Statafederal_elections.do

Back to the data repository | Back to my website