2008
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.
Colorado was the tipping point. Line up the states Obama carried from widest margin to narrowest: Colorado’s 9 electoral votes are the ones that took Obama to 278, past the 270 majority. Obama carried it by 214,987 votes (8.95 points).
The cheapest set of Obama’s states that would have given McCain a majority is these 7 states (listed in the table below) — 97 electoral votes. Obama’s combined margin in these states was 990,622 votes.
A margin is overturned when more than half of it switches sides, so this path would have needed at least 495,316 Obama voters to vote for McCain instead, in exactly those states. Had that happened, the count would have been McCain 270, Obama 268.
| State | EV | Margin | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| North Carolina | 15 | 14,177 | 0.33 |
| Indiana | 11 | 28,391 | 1.03 |
| Florida | 27 | 236,450 | 2.82 |
| Ohio | 20 | 262,224 | 4.59 |
| Virginia | 13 | 234,527 | 6.30 |
| Iowa | 7 | 146,561 | 9.53 |
| New Hampshire | 4 | 68,292 | 9.61 |
| Total | 97 | 990,622 |
Margin = the winner’s votes minus the runner-up’s in that state. Points = that margin as a share of every vote cast there.
Flipping the winning path’s states plus Nevada and New Mexico but without Iowa and New Hampshire (Obama’s combined margin 1,022,268 votes) would have left nobody at 270: McCain 269, Obama 269. A tie is not a win. The Twelfth Amendment would then have sent the choice to the House of Representatives, voting one vote per state delegation.
No single state Obama carried was big enough to have elected McCain on its own.
Electoral votes in parentheses: the block each state cast for Obama. This uses electoral votes only, not margins.
Nationally, Obama received 69,498,516 votes and McCain 59,948,323, so Obama finished 9,550,193 votes ahead of McCain (7.27 points). Obama won the Electoral College 365–173.
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 270 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 270 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 270, 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 2008 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 270, the threshold 2008 actually used, out of 538 electoral votes.
- If nobody reaches 270, 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.