1908
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.
West Virginia was the tipping point. Line up the states Taft carried from widest margin to narrowest: West Virginia’s 7 electoral votes are the ones that took Taft to 247, past the 242 majority. Taft carried it by 26,451 votes (10.25 points).
The cheapest set of Taft’s states that would have given Bryan a majority is these 9 states (listed in the table below) — 80 electoral votes. Taft’s combined margin in these states was 145,900 votes.
A margin is overturned when more than half of it switches sides, so this path would have needed at least 72,955 Taft voters to vote for Bryan instead, in exactly those states. Had that happened, the count would have been Bryan 242, Taft 241.
| State | EV | Margin | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Missouri | 18 | 629 | 0.09 |
| Maryland | 2 | 605 | 0.25 |
| Indiana | 15 | 10,731 | 1.49 |
| Montana | 3 | 3,007 | 4.37 |
| Delaware | 3 | 2,943 | 6.13 |
| Ohio | 23 | 69,591 | 6.20 |
| Kansas | 10 | 36,007 | 9.58 |
| Wyoming | 3 | 5,928 | 15.76 |
| Idaho | 3 | 16,459 | 16.92 |
| Total | 80 | 145,900 |
Margin = the winner’s votes minus the runner-up’s in that state. Points = that margin as a share of every vote cast there.
No single state Taft carried was big enough to have elected Bryan on its own.
Electoral votes in parentheses: the block each state cast for Taft. This uses electoral votes only, not margins.
Nationally, Taft received 7,678,335 votes and Bryan 6,408,979, so Taft finished 1,269,356 votes ahead of Bryan (8.53 points). Taft won the Electoral College 321–162.
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 242 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 242 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 242, 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 1908 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 242, the threshold 1908 actually used, out of 483 electoral votes.
- If nobody reaches 242, 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.