Arkansas's electoral votes in U.S. presidential elections 1836-2024

The U.S. presidential election has been contested in Arkansas on 46 occasions, and the Natural State has correctly voted for the winning candidate 27 times (not including in 1872**), giving it a success rate of 59 percent. Arkansas has voted for the Democratic candidate in 33 elections, the Republican candidate in 12**, and the 1968 election was the only time when a third-party candidate won Arkansas' electoral votes in a presidential election. Arkansas has generally voted for the more conservative candidate from the two major parties, making the transition from Democrat to Republican during the civil rights era in the 1960s.

Exceptions

Despite exhibiting generally conservative tendencies, Arkansas has voted for the more liberal option on a few occasions. The most recent examples of this were in the 1992 and 1996 elections, where Arkansas native, Bill Clinton, carried the state with around 53 percent of the popular vote each time. The only other election where Arkansas voted Democrat since 1964 was when Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald R. Ford in 1976, winning almost two thirds of Arkansas' votes. Between 1836 and 1964, Arkansas voted Democrat on all but three occasions; between 1864 and 1872. The reasons for this were due to Arkansas' secession during the American Civil War (where they did not participate in the 1864 election), before stringent Reconstruction policies, black suffrage, and white voter disenfranchisement gave Grant the victory in Arkansas in 1868 and 1872 (although Arkansas' 1872 electoral votes were rejected by Congress due to irregularities). Arkansas gave its electoral votes to a third-party candidate on just one occasion, voting for the American Independent Party's George Wallace in 1968; Wallace carried five southern states on a segregationist, anti-civil rights platform, which saw many white, southern voters move away from the increasingly liberal Democratic Party.

Arkansas natives

Since its admission to the union in 1836, it would take over 150 years before an Arkansan would appear as a presidential candidate on a major party's ticket; as of the 2024 election, Bill Clinton remains the only U.S. president, and the only major party candidate, to come from Arkansas. Between 1836 and 1904, Arkansas' designated number of electoral votes grew from three to nine, and it remained at this number until 1948. From 1952 to 1960 it was reduced to eight, before falling again to just six electoral votes since 1964.