The US Election: A Review of Votes Since 1976
The data visualisation below includes voting data for each US election since 1976. You can navigate through the years by adjusting the slider to see how voting patterns have changed over the years. Notably the Democrats were relatively successful in Southern states during the elections for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. However, Ronald Reagan was so successful in the 1980s that he nearly had a clean sweep and won 525 electoral college votes against only 13 for Walter Mondale in the 1984 election. If you hover over the states and wait for the bar chart to appear you can see how votes in each state have changed over time. West Virginia for example has changed from being a fairly solid (blue) Democrat state until 1996 to now being a reliable (red) Republican stronghold.
Data sources:
US Election data 1976-2020 by State
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/42MVDX
National Debt Since 1929
https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to-gdp-and-major-events-3306287
National GDP Over Time
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV
Crime stats USA
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm