CounterfactualNot a historical record
1800
What if these states had gone the other way?
In 1800 nobody reached the 70 electoral votes a majority required — Thomas Jefferson finished with 73 against John Adams's 65 — so the House of Representatives chose the president. Move a state and the count moves with it.
What if · 1800
Click a state to hand it to the next candidate
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.
The tipping point
The House of Representatives chose the winner, so no state carried anyone to a majority.
The narrowest path for Adams
The House of Representatives chose the winner — nobody had an Electoral College majority to overturn.
One state on its own
Nobody won an Electoral College majority in 1800, so there is no single state to flip.
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.
How this toy works
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 1800 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 1800 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 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.