1920
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.
Rhode Island was the tipping point. Line up the states Harding carried from widest margin to narrowest: Rhode Island’s 5 electoral votes are the ones that took Harding to 267, past the 266 majority. Harding carried it by 52,401 votes (31.19 points).
The cheapest set of Harding’s states that would have given Cox a majority is these 22 states (listed in the table below) — 140 electoral votes. Harding’s combined margin in these states was 1,192,978 votes.
A margin is overturned when more than half of it switches sides, so this path would have needed at least 596,507 Harding voters to vote for Cox instead, in exactly those states. Had that happened, the count would have been Cox 267, Harding 264.
| State | EV | Margin | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tennessee | 12 | 13,271 | 3.10 |
| Oklahoma | 10 | 26,778 | 5.50 |
| New Mexico | 3 | 10,966 | 10.40 |
| Arizona | 3 | 7,462 | 11.21 |
| Missouri | 18 | 152,363 | 11.43 |
| West Virginia | 8 | 61,218 | 12.00 |
| Maryland | 8 | 55,491 | 12.95 |
| Delaware | 3 | 12,947 | 13.65 |
| Indiana | 15 | 185,006 | 14.65 |
| Utah | 4 | 24,916 | 17.09 |
| New Hampshire | 4 | 32,534 | 20.45 |
| Nevada | 3 | 5,628 | 20.70 |
| Colorado | 6 | 68,312 | 23.39 |
| Oregon | 5 | 63,573 | 26.65 |
| Montana | 4 | 52,096 | 29.11 |
| Connecticut | 7 | 108,517 | 29.69 |
| Rhode Island | 5 | 52,401 | 31.19 |
| Idaho | 4 | 42,396 | 31.26 |
| Wyoming | 3 | 17,662 | 33.63 |
| Maine | 6 | 77,394 | 39.12 |
| South Dakota | 5 | 74,754 | 41.02 |
| Vermont | 4 | 47,293 | 52.57 |
| Total | 140 | 1,192,978 |
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 Harding carried was big enough to have elected Cox on its own.
Electoral votes in parentheses: the block each state cast for Harding. This uses electoral votes only, not margins.
Nationally, Harding received 16,144,093 votes and Cox 9,139,661, so Harding finished 7,004,432 votes ahead of Cox (26.17 points). Harding won the Electoral College 404–127.
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 266 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 266 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 266, 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 1920 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 266, the threshold 1920 actually used, out of 531 electoral votes.
- If nobody reaches 266, 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.