alternatehistory.com

When people talk about the 1864 presidential elections PODs, the standard (self reassuring) response is "212 to 21". Considering the (I use a british understatement) "peculiar" US presidential electoral system, those numbers do not reflect the reality.

I got the actual data and, using a spreadsheet, I investigated the question: what is the minimum vote swing that makes Lincoln lose? from the data I list below, the answer is not so reassuring.

Starting Point: Lincoln 212 McClellan 21

1% swing level

New York (6749 votes out of 730721) -> Lincoln 179 McClellan 54

3% swing level
Connecticut (2388 out of 86958) -> Lincoln 173 McClellan 60
Pennsylvania (18849 out of 573735) -> Lincoln 147 McClellan 86

5% swing level
New Hampshire (3562 out of 69630) -> Lincoln 142 McClellan 91

8% swing level
Oregon (1431 out of 18345) -> Lincoln 139 McClellan 94

9% swing level
Illinois (30788 out of 348236) -> Lincoln 123 McClellan 110

10% swing level
Maryland (7414 out of 72892) -> Lincoln 116 McClellan 117
Michigan (16987 out of 165279) -> Lincoln 108 McClellan 125

History has changed, McClellan is president. Summing the deltas of the above list, all it takes is to change just 88168 well placed votes out of a total of 4031887 (a fraction of just 2.2% !!!). When Lincoln was sweating cold, he had all the reasons to do so.

Anything more is overkill. E.g., a 13% swing would also give Wisconsin and Ohio to McClellan, (29 ELs) bringing the result to Lincoln 79 McClellan 154 which would go down to history as a crushing defeat for the republicans and "their war".

Note that this is the situation after Atlanta, after Mobile Bay, after the oscillating peace/no-let's-continue-the-war [1] democratic/McClellan electoral platform, after everything was pointing to a collapse of the confederacy in weeks or, at most, months. Without Atlanta, with the spectre of a still long war, with a steadily anti-war democratic platform, I am certain that this tiny electoral change would have happened.

At that point, all the real northern objectives had been attained: the middle west was not land locked/hostage of confederate fluvial tariffs, any confederate dream of expansion in the west was over, nobody was going to oppose high tariffs and transcontinental railroads. The fate of the blacks still in the south? for further info about the attitudes north of the Mason-Dixon line check Oregon black-less utopia enshrined in its founding 1859 constitution.


[1] after such campaign, any staunch anti-war voter would have just stayed home because the war would have continued anyway; with a stable anti-war platform we have to account also for those non-voters which are going en-mass to support McClellan.
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