Sean Trende’s excellent Real Clear Politics article on the missing white voters in 2012 got me thinking: In what states did Mitt Romney get fewer votes than George W. Bush had in 2004 and in what states did he get more? In both these elections incumbent presidents won with 51% of the popular vote. Roughly equal numbers of Americans voted — 122 million in 2004, 129 million in 2012 — and similar numbers of votes were cast for Bush (62.0 million) and Romney (60.9 million), which means that Romney got 2.4% fewer votes than Bush.
When you put the percentage increases or decreases on an outline map of the states, you get a pretty clear picture. Romney received fewer votes than Bush in the Northeast, the Midwest and the Pacific states, and he received more votes than Bush in the South and the Rocky Mountain states. But let’s look at the numbers in a little more detail.
