1796
What it would have taken
Counterfactual arithmetic from each state’s recorded popular vote. It measures how close the result was; it does not predict what voters would have done.
State-by-state popular votes for 1796 are not yet sourced on this site, so the tipping point and the narrowest paths cannot be computed. The electoral-vote arithmetic below needs no popular votes.
9 states Adams carried were each big enough on their own to have elected Jefferson: Connecticut (9), Delaware (3), Massachusetts (16), Maryland (7), New Hampshire (6), New Jersey (7), New York (12), Rhode Island (4) and Vermont (4).
Electoral votes in parentheses: the block each state cast for Adams. This uses electoral votes only, not margins.
How these are defined
- Flip
- Exactly what a click on the map does: the electoral votes a state cast for the candidate who carried it move to another candidate. District and faithless electors stay as cast.
- Margin
- The winner’s votes minus the runner-up’s in a state, from the state’s recorded popular vote. Points are that margin divided by every vote cast in the state.
- Tipping point
- Order the states the winner carried from widest margin to narrowest and add up their electoral votes; the tipping point is the state where the running total first reaches a majority. Its margin here is over the next-best candidate in that state.
- Narrowest path
- Of every set of states the winner carried, the one that would have given the runner-up at least 70 electoral votes with the smallest combined margin. Found by an exact search, not by taking the closest states in order. A tie or any result short of 70 does not count as a win.
- Switched voters
- One voter changing sides moves a margin by two, so a margin of N is overturned when more than N ÷ 2 voters switch. The minimum is the sum of that, state by state. Real elections never move this neatly; this is arithmetic, not a forecast.
- No majority
- When nobody reaches 70, including a tie, the House of Representatives chooses the president, one vote per state delegation.
The map is a toy: anything you flip on it is invented. Clicking a state hands its electoral votes to the next candidate on the 1796 ballot, then to the next, and finally back to the candidate who really carried it — nothing here changes what happened.
- Only the block of electoral votes a state cast for its own winner moves. District and faithless electors stay as cast, because individual electors — not the state — cast them.
- The majority line is 70, the threshold 1796 actually used, out of 138 electoral votes.
- If nobody reaches 70, the Twelfth Amendment sends the choice to the House of Representatives — which is how 1800 and 1824 really ended.
- The address bar carries your scenario, so a link you copy opens on the same map. Reset, or a link with no scenario, restores the real result.