Aaron O'Neill
Research lead for society, economy, and politics: Europe & global
Get in touch with us nowAlabama's electoral votes in U.S. presidential elections 1820-2024
The U.S. presidential election has been contested in Alabama on 51 occasions since 1820, and Alabama has successfully voted for the winning candidate in 27 of these elections, giving an overall success rate of 53 percent. The Democratic nominee has won the state 31 times, although Alabama has been a safe, Republican "red state" since Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980, and Donald Trump carried Alabama by a comfortable margin in the three most recent elections. Since being admitted to the union in 1819, Alabama's number of electoral college votes grew from just three in 1820, to twelve in the 1910s and 1920s; before falling to nine electoral votes in each election since 1972.
Conservative tendencies
Throughout history, Alabama has generally voted for the more conservative option of the major parties in presidential elections. Notable exceptions to this trend were in 1948 and 1968, where Alabama voted for the segregationist, third-party candidates Strom Thurmond and George Wallace respectively. Examples where Alabama did not vote conservative were during the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War, where black suffrage and widespread disenfranchisement among white voters led to back-to-back victories for Ulysses S. Grant, in 1868 and 1872 (Alabama did not take part in the 1864 election as it had seceded from the union). As with most former-Confederate states, Alabama was a Democratic stronghold until the 1960s, where Lyndon B. Johnson's civil rights policies eventually turned the state against the party; the only time Alabama has voted Democrat since then was in the 1976 election, where Georgia's Jimmy Carter carried the south as he defeated Nixon's successor, Gerald R. Ford.
Alabamian contenders
As of 2020, no U.S. president or major party candidate has had Alabama as their home state, while former governor George Wallace is the only native Alabamian to have won a significant number of electoral votes for a third party in a U.S. presidential election.
