1852
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 1852 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.
No single state Pierce carried was big enough to have elected Scott on its own.
Electoral votes in parentheses: the block each state cast for Pierce. This uses electoral votes only, not margins.
Nationally, Pierce received 1,605,943 votes and Scott 1,386,418, so Pierce finished 219,525 votes ahead of Scott (6.95 points). Pierce won the Electoral College 254–42.
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 149 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 149 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 149, 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 1852 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 149, the threshold 1852 actually used, out of 296 electoral votes.
- If nobody reaches 149, 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.