There are two ways to fulfill this challenge. The first is much easier - Washington dying early and a federalist government under Adams or Hamilton running over state legislatures and having authoritarian leanings, but no real power base, and being destroyed by every state's secession like the Articles of Confederation were.
The other is far harder. It requires:
1) A coherent "east" as a common region. OTL the west was seen as one at times, but the east had a very sharp north-south divide which never really went away, so politics in the US have really been north vs. south vs. west. You really need to paper over the *other* secession somehow for east-west tensions to grow.
2) Population. The 13 colonies even today contain an enormous chunk of the US population, and it used to be much bigger. I'd suggest a greater cession of oft-disputed western lands ala the Northwest Ordinance as a PoD - if the 13 colonies are only the lands on the east side of the Applachians and don't include the part of upstate New York which was once the Iroquois confederacy, or lots of other regions in other big states, and those are instead part of western states, the eastern states are a little less of a 800-pound gorilla.
Possible? If you're creative enough and push the PoD back far enough, most things are. But it'd be difficult.