AHC: Make the Know Nothings win a majority of the Electoral College in 1856

What it says on the tin. Make the Know Nothings win a majority of the EC in 1856, not just enough to get a plurality or deadlock it. It doesn't have to be Fillmore as the candidate, however.
 
To remount an old hobby-horse.

The Constitution is amended in 1820 so that each Congressional district chooses one Presidential Elector, with the others being chosen as the State Legislature decides. This gives a purely sectional party like the Republicans a far higher mountain to climb where electing a President is concerned. So a lot of Northern pols who became Republicans OTL, now decide that the Know-Nothings are a better bet and join that party instead. That doesn't guarantee a K-N win, but puts them in with a chance.

I am of course assuming here that the Mexican War and Kansas-Nebraska Act are not butterflied away. If the KNA is, then the Republican Party may never even get founded.
 
I would say it's impossible with the Electoral College as we know it unless the Republican Party as we know it is never formed.

If Fillmore carried *every state* where he trailed the winner by less than *twenty-five* percentage points in OTL, he would still have only 115 electoral votes, well short of the 149 needed for a majority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1856

Now of course all sorts of things could lead to a somewhat better Know Nothing showing. The Democrats' choice of Buchanan was a blow to Fillmore, because Buchanan could appeal to some Old Line Whigs as a seasoned statesman who offered the best chance to save the Union (and had been fortunate enough to be out of the country at the time of the Kansas-Nebraska bill). A Pierce or a Douglas might have been harder to accept. But this would at most help Fillmore marginally.

Not do I think a different Know Nothing candidate would matter that much. Houston had his own disadvantages, though he would at least have made Texas closer than in OTL.

The one wild card is George Law, a "common sense business man." At https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/O9skpaOYCIU/68SlV9avybIJ I compared him with Ross Perot; today of course there is obviously a different comparison... http://origin-www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-07/the-trump-of-1856 but I think a lot of the Old Line Whigs would be very suspicious of Law.
 
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