Here's an idea I just started thinking about. I'm interested in presidential primary data (who won which states in which order, etc.), but the Atlas only has this for the 2000-2008 elections. Finding such data for earlier elections actually seems to be quite difficult (except for Iowa and New Hampshire). I don't know of any one archive on the web that contains, say, the 1992 or 1996 primary results for every state in the nation.
However, there is an excellent archive of news articles at the NYT:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?srchst=nyt&&srcht=a&srchr=nOne could simply select dates from around primary season in years past, and locate news articles, which report on primary election results. For example, set the search parameters to February 1992, and do searches using keywords like "Clinton primary" or "Tsongas caucus" or what have you, and you can find out that, for example, Bob Kerrey won the South Dakota primary on Feb. 25th, 1992. Here's the story:
linkYou can find this stuff relatively fast, as the news articles on each primary tend to tell you when and where the preceeding or successive primary on the calendar was held, and so you can constrain the next set of search criteria accordingly.
This could be done for the 1988-1996 primaries. Earlier than that, and most of the articles are behind a firewall that costs money to access. But you still might be able to reconstruct things just based on the headlines, which they give you for free.
Anyway, I'm probably going to do this (no promises on a timeline for when I get it done) for the 1988-1996 elections, just making note of the dates of the primaries and who won. %ages for each candidate and delegate counts are only sporadically reported, but if anyone else wants to look for those, I encourage you to do so. Here's what I was able to piece together on the 1992 Democratic race up through Super Tuesday:
(date/state/winner)
feb 10: ia - harkin
feb 18: nh - tsongas
feb 23: me - tsongas
feb 25: sd - kerrey
mar 3: ga - clinton
co - brown
id, mn - harkin
md - tsongas
mar 7: sc - clinton
mar 10 (Super Tuesday):
tx, fl, la, ms, ok, tn, mo - clinton
ma, ri, de - tsongas
That's as far as I've gotten with that so far. Didn't take me very long to reconstruct that. I encourage anyone with the motivation to participate in this too, and post whatever primary results they find. Or, alternatively, if there's an easier way to find this stuff, let me know.
