A proposal by Pennsylvania’s GOP to allocate its electoral votes by Congressional district has generated a lot of debate – and Dave Freddoso does a great job laying out the potential ramifications here. But for all the talk, you’d have to go back to 1876 to find a presidential election in which the Pennsylvania plan may have actually affected the outcome. Had that happened, Rutherford B. Hayes would not have been elected president, Reconstruction may have continued and Jim Crow laws may not have permeated the South.
Obviously, that’s a lot of hypotheticals, but since the exercise was too fun to resist, I went back and looked at every race at David Leip’s indispensable Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, to see if dividing Pennsylvania’s electoral votes would have made a difference in any of them. (NOTE: I didn’t consider what would happen if all the states adopted this approach, because district level data is not as easy to come by for older elections).
Most presidential elections have been decided by a wide enough margin that changing a portion of electoral votes in one state wouldn’t have made a difference. In elections where it theoretically could have –in 2000, for instance – the losing candidate won Pennsylvania anyway.
So you have to go back to 1876, when, by the end of Election Day, New York Gov. Samuel Tilden was ahead in the popular vote and had secured 184 of the needed 185 electoral votes, with 20 still outstanding. After a long election dispute that’s described in greater detail here, Rutherford B. Hayes was able to obtain all of the remaining electoral votes and win by a slight 185 to 184 margin. But Hayes’s total included 29 votes from Pennsylvania, which he won by a narrow 51 percent to 48 percent margin. Had those votes been allocated by Congressional district, Tilden may very well have emerged as the winner.
The outcome of the disputed election would end up having dramatic historical consequences. As PBS noted in the Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, “The night before President Grant’s term expired, the Senate announced Hayes had been elected President. The deadlock was broken behind closed doors when Southern Democrats agreed to support Hayes’ claim for the Presidency if he would support increased funding for Southern internal improvements and agree to end Reconstruction, thus guaranteeing home rule — meaning white control — in the South. Hayes became President and the Southern Democrats could reverse with impunity the gains that blacks had made during Reconstruction.”
If we go back even further, you may recall that the election of 1800 actually ended in an electoral college tie and was thrown to the House of Representatives, but at the time the U.S. had a much different electoral system altogether.
