In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected president with 55.93% of the popular vote. http://www.uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1828 This is a percentage that would not be matched by any subsequent candidate--not even Grant running against the hapless Greeley in 1872--until Theodore Roosevelt's 56.42% landslide in 1904. http://www.uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1904 In the Electoral College, too, Jackson's victory was decisive: 178 to 83.
And yet, it is at least theoretically possible for the switch of a very small number of voters to have given John Quincy Adams an Electoral College majority while lagging well behind Jackson in the popular vote. Thus, Adams would for the second time have prevailed against a candidate (Jackson) who had received more popular votes than himself.
Donald B. Cole in his *Vindicating Andrew Jackson: The 1828 Election and the Rise of the Two-Party System* (University Press of Kansas 2009), pp. 182-3 explains how it could be done: "As political scientist Svend Petersen later demonstrated, a switch of only 11,517 votes in five states (slightly less than 1 percent of the total) would have brought Adams a very close victory in the electoral college and made him president for four more years."
Petersen's calculations:
State....Hypothetical shift ....Hypothetical Adams ElectoralCollege gain/Jackson loss
Ohio 2,101 16
Kentucky 3,968 14
New York (7 districts; 2 at large) 2,600 9
Louisiana 255 5
Indiana 2,593 5
Total 11,517 49
Thus, Adams would have won 132 electoral votes and Jackson 129. Adams is re-elected.
Striking as this analysis is, it seems implausible that the results can be changed this way, because in less populous states a shift of a small number of popular votes requires a rather large shift in the *percent* of the vote. Thus, in Indiana Jackson got 56.62 percent of the vote--actually higher than his nationwide percentage. The reason that so few votes were needed to change the result in Indiana is that it was still a small state at the time.
So is there any way we can get Adams to win without changing the vote of a landslide state like Indiana? Actually, there is (though we still have to change the vote of Kentucky, which was only slightly less pro-Jackson than Indiana--see below). After the 1824 election, New York changed from choosing electors by the legislature to choosing them by popular vote. However, unlike the majority of states, the vote was by districts (with two electors chosen at large). As Sean Wilentz noted in *The Rise of American Democracy*, had New York instead adopted the at-large-winner-takes-all system used in most states, Adams could have won the electoral vote simply by carrying four additional states: New York, Ohio, Louisiana, and Kentucky. (Actually, Adams in this scenario can defeat Jackson by 133 to 128 just by carrying New York with 20 additional electoral votes, Ohio with 16, and Kentucky with 14, even without Louisiana. But it is unlikely Adams can carry Kentucky if he can't carry Louisiana--though maybe it's just possible if he has Caly as his running mate.) A total switch of less than 10,000 votes--less than one percent of the national total--would be required.
Let's examine these four states one by one to see how plausible their switching to Adams would be.
(1) New York, 36 electoral votes (OTL Jackson 51.45%, Adams 48.55%). A switch is very plausible here. The sudden death of De Witt Clinton in early 1828 endangered Jackson's chances in the state: Clintonians who would have voted for Jackson because Clinton endorsed him would now feel free to vote for Adams. Here Martin Van Buren's decision to run for governor following Clinton's death--and the failure of Van Buren's opponents to unify--may have been decisive:
"The Adams majorities on the manor lands and in western New York almost won him the state, but large Jackson majorities in New York City and central New York were enough to give the state to the Jacksonians. The presidential vote was remarkably close: Jackson 140,783 (20 electoral votes), Adams 135,413 (16 electoral votes) [These figures diverge very slightly from those in http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/u/usa/pres/1828.txt and http://www.uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1828&fips=36&f=0 My guess is that the divergence stems from counting the largest vote for Adams and Jackson at-large elector versus adding up the votes won by the district electors.] Van Buren's decision to run for governor proved to be a wise one, for he won the election by a substantial margin, but only because the nomination of an Anti-Masonic candidate split the opposition vote. The final tally was Van Buren 136,794 (49.5 percent), Thompson (Adams party) 106,444 (38.5 percent), and Southwick (Anti-Mason) 33,345 (12.1 percent). *If the Adams and Anti-Masonic parties had run a coordinated campaign, it is quite likely that Thompson and Adams would have carried New York*..." [emphasis added]Cole, pp. 193-4.
(2) Ohio, 16 electoral votes (OTL Jackson 51.60%, Adams 48.40%). Another state that Adams could very plausibly have won. In 1824, Henry Clay had carried it with 38.5 percent of the vote to Jackson's 37.0 Indeed, Clay and Adams had won a combined 63 percent of the vote in Ohio in 1824. Undoubtedly, Clay's popularity had diminished in the state due to the orrupt bargain" charge, but his "American System" was still popular. Unfortunately for the Adams party, the Jacksonians blurred the substantive issues--they certainly did not come out against internal improvements or protectionism, and indeed Martin Van Buren had largely been responsible for the "Tariff of Abominations." (Adams himself had never been too enthusiastic about high tariffs, anyway, and feared that making the tariff an issue would hurt him in southern states like Virginia--which he should have realized he had not the slightest chance of carrying.) Instead, they concentrated on charges of corruption and Adams' decision to install a billiard table in the White House... (The Ohio state elections came only two weeks before the general election and they showed how closely contested Ohio would be. The Adams party's candidate for governor, the incumbent Allen Trimble, narrowly defeated his Jacksonian opponent, five-term congressman John W. Campbell by 53,981 to 51,861, but the Jacksonians increased their share of the congressional delegation from four to eight our of fourteen.)
One thought is that maybe Adams could have carried Ohio if he had chosen a running mate more attractive to the West than Richard Rush (Rush was a Pennsylvanian, but there was no chance of Adams, at least so long as he did not outspokenly back higher tariffs, carrying Pennsylvania.) An interesting choice would be Senator William Henry Harrison. (Instead, Adams appointed Harrison minister to Gran Colombia.) Harrison might well enable Adams to carry Ohio, and might even make Indiana competitive. (Of course naming Harrison would seem inconsistent with the Adams party's argument that a "mere military chieftain" should not be president. But they might reply that Harrison was a different kind of military man than Jackson--he didn't kill militiamen whose only crime was wanting to go home when their enlistments expired, he had never been in a fatal duel, etc.) Even Clay would have helped Adams in Ohio more than Rush; the fact that Clay almost carried Ohio while losing heavily nationwide to Jackson in 1832, and carried Ohio while losing the rest of the Old Northwest in 1844, seems to indicate that even after the "corrupt bargain" he was reasonably popular in Ohio. (Clay had been offered the Adams party's vice-presidential nomination but turned it down allegedly on the grounds of poor health.) Unfortunately, while Clay did make some "stump speeches" during the campaign, they were mostly to defend himself from the "corrupt bargain" charge. If instead he had also warned about the danger posed by Jackson's low-tariff, anti-federal-aid-to-internal-improvements southern supporters (including by this time Jackson's running mate Calhoun) he might have helped Adams in close northern and border states.
(3) Louisiana, 5 electoral votes (OTL Jackson 53.01, Adams 46.99). It may seem paradoxical that the state where Jackson had won his greatest military victory would turn out to be by far his weakest state in the South (Maryland was more eastern than southern). But as Daniel Walker Howe notes (*What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848*), p. 281, "There his high-handed conduct ["his authoritarian martial rule after the battle," as Donald Cole puts it--DT] was remembered, he was unpopular with the French Creoles, and the sugarcane planters needed a tariff." http://books.google.com/books?id=0XIvPDF9ijcC&pg=PA281 The state was widely expected to be close, which is one reason Jackson was in New Orleans in January 1828 to celebrate the thirteenth anniversary of his triumph. (Of course he insisted the trip was strictly non-political.) "In the state election in July [1828] the Adams party won control of the legislature, elected the governor, and took two of the three seats in the US House of Representatives. Jackson's triumphant return in January had apparently not secured the state." Cole, *Vindicating Andrew Jackson,* p. 167.
Here again a vice-presidential candidate with more appeal to the West and a greater emphasis by Adams on protection (in this case for sugar) might have enabled Adams to carry the state.
(4) Kentucky, 14 electoral votes (OTL Jackson 55.54, Adams 44.46). This is the hard one. In Henry Clay's own state, Jackson won almost as decisively as he did in the nation as a whole. That Adams was in trouble in the state was evident from the August 1828 state elections. The Adams party's candidate for governor, Thomas Metcalfe, did defeat the Jackson party's candidate William T. Barry by more than a thousand votes, "but the Jacksonians won a sixteen-vote majority in the lower house of the legislature and a two-vote majority in the upper house." (Cole, p. 168.) (To show how oversimplified the stereotypes of the two parties were, Barry, the candidate of the "democratic" Jackson party, was a college-educated ex-Federalist, while the "aristocratic" Adams party's candidate Metcalfe was a self-made, little-educated stonemason.)
Perhaps having Clay on the ticket would have helped in Kentucky. He may have lost some of his popularity, but his showing there in 1832 would seem to indicate that much of it remained. Better organization by the Adams party, here as elsewhere, would have helped--though it is not surprising that the Jacksonians, who believed in political parties, were more efficient at organizing them than their opponents, who often still held the ideal of a president "above parties." (Adams' keeping John McLean, a Monroe administration holdover and a friend of Calhoun's, as Postmaster General, was a real political disaster. McLean controlled more patronage than anybody else, and as Cole puts it, p. 52, "was more loyal to Calhoun, Jackson and himself than he was to Adams and Clay.") And here too, more emphasis on the tariff might have been helpful (in Kentucky's case protection for hemp was popular). Indeed, it is hard to think of any state where stronger support for a high tariff would have hurt Adams except southern states he had no chance of carrying, anyway.
(Even if having Clay as running mate would help Adams in Kentucky, would it cost him other states' electoral votes? I doubt it. Those who were convinced there was a "corrupt bargain" wouldn't vote for Adams in any event, and it's not clear to me that the vice-presidency--which had *not* been the usual path to an eventual presidential nomination for many years--would give the charge any greater plausibility than his accepting the post of Secretary of State, which *had* been the usual stepping stone to the presidency, did.)
So a second Adams "minority" victory, while unlikely, was not impossible. (A realization of this was probably one reason Jackson, early in his presidency, urged a constitutional amendment providing for direct election of the president.) This IMO would not necessarily have been good for the country even if one sympathizes with Adams' agenda of positive government. The South would be very bitter (especially if Adams won the electoral vote in part by being more protectionist than in OTL) and nullification--and even secession as a last resort--might get much more widespread support than in OTL.
And yet, it is at least theoretically possible for the switch of a very small number of voters to have given John Quincy Adams an Electoral College majority while lagging well behind Jackson in the popular vote. Thus, Adams would for the second time have prevailed against a candidate (Jackson) who had received more popular votes than himself.
Donald B. Cole in his *Vindicating Andrew Jackson: The 1828 Election and the Rise of the Two-Party System* (University Press of Kansas 2009), pp. 182-3 explains how it could be done: "As political scientist Svend Petersen later demonstrated, a switch of only 11,517 votes in five states (slightly less than 1 percent of the total) would have brought Adams a very close victory in the electoral college and made him president for four more years."
Petersen's calculations:
State....Hypothetical shift ....Hypothetical Adams ElectoralCollege gain/Jackson loss
Ohio 2,101 16
Kentucky 3,968 14
New York (7 districts; 2 at large) 2,600 9
Louisiana 255 5
Indiana 2,593 5
Total 11,517 49
Thus, Adams would have won 132 electoral votes and Jackson 129. Adams is re-elected.
Striking as this analysis is, it seems implausible that the results can be changed this way, because in less populous states a shift of a small number of popular votes requires a rather large shift in the *percent* of the vote. Thus, in Indiana Jackson got 56.62 percent of the vote--actually higher than his nationwide percentage. The reason that so few votes were needed to change the result in Indiana is that it was still a small state at the time.
So is there any way we can get Adams to win without changing the vote of a landslide state like Indiana? Actually, there is (though we still have to change the vote of Kentucky, which was only slightly less pro-Jackson than Indiana--see below). After the 1824 election, New York changed from choosing electors by the legislature to choosing them by popular vote. However, unlike the majority of states, the vote was by districts (with two electors chosen at large). As Sean Wilentz noted in *The Rise of American Democracy*, had New York instead adopted the at-large-winner-takes-all system used in most states, Adams could have won the electoral vote simply by carrying four additional states: New York, Ohio, Louisiana, and Kentucky. (Actually, Adams in this scenario can defeat Jackson by 133 to 128 just by carrying New York with 20 additional electoral votes, Ohio with 16, and Kentucky with 14, even without Louisiana. But it is unlikely Adams can carry Kentucky if he can't carry Louisiana--though maybe it's just possible if he has Caly as his running mate.) A total switch of less than 10,000 votes--less than one percent of the national total--would be required.
Let's examine these four states one by one to see how plausible their switching to Adams would be.
(1) New York, 36 electoral votes (OTL Jackson 51.45%, Adams 48.55%). A switch is very plausible here. The sudden death of De Witt Clinton in early 1828 endangered Jackson's chances in the state: Clintonians who would have voted for Jackson because Clinton endorsed him would now feel free to vote for Adams. Here Martin Van Buren's decision to run for governor following Clinton's death--and the failure of Van Buren's opponents to unify--may have been decisive:
"The Adams majorities on the manor lands and in western New York almost won him the state, but large Jackson majorities in New York City and central New York were enough to give the state to the Jacksonians. The presidential vote was remarkably close: Jackson 140,783 (20 electoral votes), Adams 135,413 (16 electoral votes) [These figures diverge very slightly from those in http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/u/usa/pres/1828.txt and http://www.uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1828&fips=36&f=0 My guess is that the divergence stems from counting the largest vote for Adams and Jackson at-large elector versus adding up the votes won by the district electors.] Van Buren's decision to run for governor proved to be a wise one, for he won the election by a substantial margin, but only because the nomination of an Anti-Masonic candidate split the opposition vote. The final tally was Van Buren 136,794 (49.5 percent), Thompson (Adams party) 106,444 (38.5 percent), and Southwick (Anti-Mason) 33,345 (12.1 percent). *If the Adams and Anti-Masonic parties had run a coordinated campaign, it is quite likely that Thompson and Adams would have carried New York*..." [emphasis added]Cole, pp. 193-4.
(2) Ohio, 16 electoral votes (OTL Jackson 51.60%, Adams 48.40%). Another state that Adams could very plausibly have won. In 1824, Henry Clay had carried it with 38.5 percent of the vote to Jackson's 37.0 Indeed, Clay and Adams had won a combined 63 percent of the vote in Ohio in 1824. Undoubtedly, Clay's popularity had diminished in the state due to the orrupt bargain" charge, but his "American System" was still popular. Unfortunately for the Adams party, the Jacksonians blurred the substantive issues--they certainly did not come out against internal improvements or protectionism, and indeed Martin Van Buren had largely been responsible for the "Tariff of Abominations." (Adams himself had never been too enthusiastic about high tariffs, anyway, and feared that making the tariff an issue would hurt him in southern states like Virginia--which he should have realized he had not the slightest chance of carrying.) Instead, they concentrated on charges of corruption and Adams' decision to install a billiard table in the White House... (The Ohio state elections came only two weeks before the general election and they showed how closely contested Ohio would be. The Adams party's candidate for governor, the incumbent Allen Trimble, narrowly defeated his Jacksonian opponent, five-term congressman John W. Campbell by 53,981 to 51,861, but the Jacksonians increased their share of the congressional delegation from four to eight our of fourteen.)
One thought is that maybe Adams could have carried Ohio if he had chosen a running mate more attractive to the West than Richard Rush (Rush was a Pennsylvanian, but there was no chance of Adams, at least so long as he did not outspokenly back higher tariffs, carrying Pennsylvania.) An interesting choice would be Senator William Henry Harrison. (Instead, Adams appointed Harrison minister to Gran Colombia.) Harrison might well enable Adams to carry Ohio, and might even make Indiana competitive. (Of course naming Harrison would seem inconsistent with the Adams party's argument that a "mere military chieftain" should not be president. But they might reply that Harrison was a different kind of military man than Jackson--he didn't kill militiamen whose only crime was wanting to go home when their enlistments expired, he had never been in a fatal duel, etc.) Even Clay would have helped Adams in Ohio more than Rush; the fact that Clay almost carried Ohio while losing heavily nationwide to Jackson in 1832, and carried Ohio while losing the rest of the Old Northwest in 1844, seems to indicate that even after the "corrupt bargain" he was reasonably popular in Ohio. (Clay had been offered the Adams party's vice-presidential nomination but turned it down allegedly on the grounds of poor health.) Unfortunately, while Clay did make some "stump speeches" during the campaign, they were mostly to defend himself from the "corrupt bargain" charge. If instead he had also warned about the danger posed by Jackson's low-tariff, anti-federal-aid-to-internal-improvements southern supporters (including by this time Jackson's running mate Calhoun) he might have helped Adams in close northern and border states.
(3) Louisiana, 5 electoral votes (OTL Jackson 53.01, Adams 46.99). It may seem paradoxical that the state where Jackson had won his greatest military victory would turn out to be by far his weakest state in the South (Maryland was more eastern than southern). But as Daniel Walker Howe notes (*What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848*), p. 281, "There his high-handed conduct ["his authoritarian martial rule after the battle," as Donald Cole puts it--DT] was remembered, he was unpopular with the French Creoles, and the sugarcane planters needed a tariff." http://books.google.com/books?id=0XIvPDF9ijcC&pg=PA281 The state was widely expected to be close, which is one reason Jackson was in New Orleans in January 1828 to celebrate the thirteenth anniversary of his triumph. (Of course he insisted the trip was strictly non-political.) "In the state election in July [1828] the Adams party won control of the legislature, elected the governor, and took two of the three seats in the US House of Representatives. Jackson's triumphant return in January had apparently not secured the state." Cole, *Vindicating Andrew Jackson,* p. 167.
Here again a vice-presidential candidate with more appeal to the West and a greater emphasis by Adams on protection (in this case for sugar) might have enabled Adams to carry the state.
(4) Kentucky, 14 electoral votes (OTL Jackson 55.54, Adams 44.46). This is the hard one. In Henry Clay's own state, Jackson won almost as decisively as he did in the nation as a whole. That Adams was in trouble in the state was evident from the August 1828 state elections. The Adams party's candidate for governor, Thomas Metcalfe, did defeat the Jackson party's candidate William T. Barry by more than a thousand votes, "but the Jacksonians won a sixteen-vote majority in the lower house of the legislature and a two-vote majority in the upper house." (Cole, p. 168.) (To show how oversimplified the stereotypes of the two parties were, Barry, the candidate of the "democratic" Jackson party, was a college-educated ex-Federalist, while the "aristocratic" Adams party's candidate Metcalfe was a self-made, little-educated stonemason.)
Perhaps having Clay on the ticket would have helped in Kentucky. He may have lost some of his popularity, but his showing there in 1832 would seem to indicate that much of it remained. Better organization by the Adams party, here as elsewhere, would have helped--though it is not surprising that the Jacksonians, who believed in political parties, were more efficient at organizing them than their opponents, who often still held the ideal of a president "above parties." (Adams' keeping John McLean, a Monroe administration holdover and a friend of Calhoun's, as Postmaster General, was a real political disaster. McLean controlled more patronage than anybody else, and as Cole puts it, p. 52, "was more loyal to Calhoun, Jackson and himself than he was to Adams and Clay.") And here too, more emphasis on the tariff might have been helpful (in Kentucky's case protection for hemp was popular). Indeed, it is hard to think of any state where stronger support for a high tariff would have hurt Adams except southern states he had no chance of carrying, anyway.
(Even if having Clay as running mate would help Adams in Kentucky, would it cost him other states' electoral votes? I doubt it. Those who were convinced there was a "corrupt bargain" wouldn't vote for Adams in any event, and it's not clear to me that the vice-presidency--which had *not* been the usual path to an eventual presidential nomination for many years--would give the charge any greater plausibility than his accepting the post of Secretary of State, which *had* been the usual stepping stone to the presidency, did.)
So a second Adams "minority" victory, while unlikely, was not impossible. (A realization of this was probably one reason Jackson, early in his presidency, urged a constitutional amendment providing for direct election of the president.) This IMO would not necessarily have been good for the country even if one sympathizes with Adams' agenda of positive government. The South would be very bitter (especially if Adams won the electoral vote in part by being more protectionist than in OTL) and nullification--and even secession as a last resort--might get much more widespread support than in OTL.