New York's electoral votes in U.S. presidential elections 1789-2020

New York has taken part in all U.S. presidential elections since 1792, and has cast the majority of its electoral votes for the nationwide winner in 47 elections, giving a success rate of 81 percent. New York has generally voted for the more liberal candidate in U.S. elections, and has been a safe Democratic state since the 1988 election. In the 2020 election, New York was a comfortable win for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who carried the state by a 23 percent margin; however, the native New Yorker, Donald Trump, won in several of New York's more rural districts with around seventy percent of their popular vote, showing a stark contrast between urban and rural districts.

Presidents from the Empire State

A total of five U.S. presidents were born in New York; these were Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Donald Trump. These five men ran for president in eleven different elections, and carried their home state in six elections; Donald Trump is the only New Yorker to have won the election without carrying his home state. Several other losing candidates have carried their home state, with the most recent being Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 (both held public office in New York, but were born elsewhere).

Declining significance

Throughout most of U.S. history, New York was the most populous state, and therefore had the largest share of electoral votes. This began in the 1812 election, where New York had 29 electoral votes; the allocation then fluctuated throughout the rest of the 1800s and early 1900s, peaking at 47 votes in the 1930s and 1940s. Since the 1950s, however, New York's allocation of electoral votes has gradually declined, and it was overtaken by California in the 1972 election, and then Texas in 2004. This is due to differing population growth rates across various regions of the U.S., as growth rates along the southern border tend to be much higher than in states along the east coast. In the 2020 election, New York's allocation of electoral votes is 29; this is expected to fall again to 28 votes in the 2024 election, where it will likely be overtaken by Florida as the third-most populous state.