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I've read a number of articles that have talked about the difference between down ticket results during the 2020 elections and the Presidential race.

But I've been unable to find raw data because the way information is broken down seems to vary. This NBC link for example shows the House results by District, but the Presidential breakdown by county, which from a number of Gerrymandering questions I know do not necessarily overlap in a way that makes matching up the numbers easy.

Are the numbers available somewhere that show the difference in vote totals for House/Presidential candidates from the same voter pool?

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    This type of data is not usually easily available until a few months after the election from my own experience. Do you want me to write a long term answer on how to find this? Nov 27, 2020 at 14:10
  • @MichaelMormon a long term answer would be excellent. Along with anything you have about the delay. I assume by easily you mean simply listed out, which means articles making claims about Outperforming or party Drag are likely using the County data and making adjustments to estimate the proportion of the county votes in each district group?
    – Jontia
    Nov 27, 2020 at 14:19

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These data are quite difficult to collate - as you've pointed out, results are most commonly reported at the county level, and congressional districts only perfectly overlap county borders very rarely. If states themselves don't provide congressional-district-level totals, the data must be calculated by hand, relying on individually totting up data at the individual precinct level. This is often difficult; as shown in my answer to this question, where I was unable to calculate exact results for Texas' 15th district due to inconsistent online reporting across counties.

However, this work is being done for the 2020 election, and has been done for previous recent elections by the Daily Kos elections team as part of their "Pres-by-CD" project. The results can be found here, and are being updated on a state-by-state basis. In 2016, this work was completed at the end of January '17.

For perhaps an insight into how painstaking this work can be, I recommend this article - to pull out one example:

But the states that don't offer precinct data in one central place? Those states make life hell. For them, you have to go county by county, and that's a brutal process. Sometimes counties post precinct results online, and some are in usable formats, like spreadsheet files. Some are less useful, like native electronic PDFs that can be converted with software but require a lot of effort to reformat.

The worst, however, are in scanned PDFs that are just brutal to convert—OCR typically chokes on them—and usually have to be reentered manually. And some results, believe it or not, are handwritten. The most amazing of all was an Excel file where numbers were represented by clip art images. (And yes, we actually once needed to use that file.)

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