alt history first US presidential election

for fun I ran the 1st presidential election in the US as an alternate history assuming that Washington decided not to run. My result is as follows:



Milton, Armstrong, Telfair, and Lincoln receive a combined 5 votes from Georgia as IRL

Harrison takes 6 votes from Maryland, as he does IRL.

Patrick Henry replaces George Clinton in taking his 3 votes, and gaining 3 more for a total of 6 votes from Virginia, for reasons that become more clear when I discuss Hancock.

Huntington still only gets votes from Connecticut, but now gets 7 instead of 2.

Combined, these candidates, who received votes from just 1 state IRL, continue to receive votes from just 1 state, but have their total go from 16 to 21 electoral votes.

Rutledge, who IRL only gets 6 votes from South Carolina, now gets 7 from that state, and 5 from Georgia, for a total of 12.

The main changes are to the 3 candidates who received votes from 3 or more states.

John Jay, goes from 9 to 21 electoral votes by gaining 1 vote in New Jersey, and 10 in Massachusetts, home of...

John Hancock, who sees a larger increase. He was ill at the time and many thought he might pass, but they also considered him similar to Adams politically, and liked him. Had Washington not run, he likely would have received far more votes as, remember, each elector can cast two ballots; with one being for Washington, voters had to be stingy with their other ballot. With Washington off the ballot, it would free people up to cast ballots for Hancock and Adams. The only state where this does not come into play is in Massachusetts itself, where both are from; as, you can not vote for two candidates both from your state. Hancock thus takes 19 electoral votes, up from 4, by winning one additional vote from both South Carolina and Virginia, and 8 additional votes from Pennsylvania, as well as 5 from New Hampshire.

The math savvy may notice there are a ton of missing votes. All of these go to Adams, the winner. Adams sweeps every state except South Carolina, where he takes 5 of the 7 available votes, and Georgia, where he is shut out.

As a result, John Jay becomes Vice President, instead of becoming the first head of the Court; Rutledge would thus take that job, holding it until he puts his foot in his mouth as he did IRL in 1795.


Adams then wins re-election in 1792.

This makes the 1796 election interesting. Jay certainly would have run, and likely won. What's interesting is that by 1800, Jay, being a New Yorker, might have swung the election towards Burr. That in itself would be an interesting story as Burr was quite a character.