I'm looking for a data on:
- Nationwide data from 1946 on Democrat and Republican share of the national vote
- Share of the seats in Congress in the same period.
Would it be possible to collect the same data at state level (such as Texas)?
Politics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people interested in governments, policies, and political processes. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityAssuming you are looking for data showing the vote share of each party for the 1946 House and Senate midterms, on state and national level, here is what I found.
Simple answer: The House of Representatives Office of the Historian has this data for every national election from 1920-2016 in original PDF form (from the Government Printing Office), including for the 1946 elections. The problem is, the PDF for 1946 is a scan of print documents in raster form (i.e., it isn't encoded in text form), so it's not optimal if you're putting it in a spreadsheet or doing other data analysis. But for quick reference, here is what I found:
That data appears to be exactly what you described as long as I interpreted it correctly. But for actual numerical data in digital form, I'd suggest looking through this list of election data sources from University of Michigan, or this list from the Library of Congress. That is probably a good starting place, depending on how specific and in what form you need the data.
As for party control in Congress through the years, see these links:
I'm sure more data available through proprietary services or in university databases, but as for what I could find on the public internet, I hope this helps.
I know this question is quite old but I just wanted to build on WClarke's answer a little more, and specifically the second part of your question...
- Share of the seats in Congress in the same period.
The two sources WClarke linked are great (and are where the total seating counts are pulled for the following visualization) but this part of your question was a good nudge for me to expose more historical data on this site we're building. Here's a more detailed / interactive seating chart for 1946 which includes exportable data and links to individual politicians of the period (e.g. Allen Ellender, a senator). Note that you can use the year slider to check out the seating shares for other years in the 1940s (most of the 1900s and 2000s data is solid, but there are seemingly still some quirks in our 1800s charts though we should have that data).
Anyway, I hope this helps some who stumble across it. I didn't realize until playing around with this that Harry Truman had no vice president for much of his presidency. Turns out that's actually happened a number of times.