Harris would have won if the United States looked like this

Harris would have won if the United States looked like this
Harris wins with this map: 270-268

Since 2016, I have maintained a tool called Redraw the States which allows users to "gerrymander" US state borders to see if they can flip the results of the electoral college. The results from 2016 were quite stark: If three counties (Lake, IL; Lucas (Toledo), OH; and Camden, NJ) moved to their neighboring state (WI, MI, and PA), then Hillary Clinton would have handily won the election.

Hillary wins 280-258! Can you spot the differences in the map?

Of course, we expected small changes to have outsize impact in 2016: Clinton won the popular vote after all. Trump only won because the strange logic of US presidential elections states that each state gets a number of "electors" equal to the number of representatives they have in the House of Representatives plus two. Even though it is not a state, DC, thanks to the Twenty-Third Amendment, also gets three electors. In every state except Nebraska and Maine, the candidate who gets the most votes gets all of the states' electors. In Nebraska and Maine, the candidate who gets the most votes in each Congressional district gets one vote, and the candidate who gets the most votes in the state gets two votes.

If a candidate wins a majority of electors (at least 270), they win the presidency. If no candidate reaches a majority, then there's an entirely separate inscrutable process by which the president is chosen.

In 2020, these rules once again allowed us to move exactly three counties to neighboring states in order to flip the election from Biden to Trump: moving Philadelphia to New Jersey, moving Savannah to South Carolina, and moving Apache County, AZ, to New Mexico.

Trump defeats Biden. 276-262

That brings us to 2024. The final electoral vote was 312-226 for Trump. (Note that Redraw the States does not handle Maine's and Nebraska's system and instead treats them the same as every other state.) Can you flip the results?

Since Trump was ahead by 2.5 million votes and the electoral college map favors Republicans, we don't expect it to be easy, but some of our former tricks still work. Moving Lake County, IL, to Wisconsin flips the state from red to blue.

Moving Lake County to Wisconsin consistently tips Wisconsin blue.

Harris lost Pennsylvania by over 120,000 votes, which turns out to be too many votes for Camden or Trenton to flip it by themselves. But moving both into Pennsylvania does flip it. That leaves Trump winning 283-255.

Getting Harris to 255.

To get Harris the remaining 15 electoral votes is not nearly as easy as compared to previous years. Trump won Michigan by around 80,000 votes, and Harris only won Toledo by around 23,000 votes. Harris did win Cuyahoga County (home of Cleveland) by over 170,000 votes. So if we could move that county to Michigan (they both border Lake Erie!), then Harris would win 271-267.

Making Cleveland the "lower lower peninsula" of Michigan leads to a Harris win.

Alternatively, if you don't believe in "water contiguity" (though Michigan of all states should definitely allow it), we could move Republicans out of Michigan and into their neighboring states. In total, if we move 6 southern counties to Indiana and Ohio while moving Toledo to Michigan, we can flip Michigan blue. This takes the electoral vote count to 270-268.

Moving around Michigan's southern border leads to a Harris win: 270-268.

With this latter strategy, we needed to move just 10 of 3113 counties on the map to flip the election result.

There are, of course, many ways to flip the result of the 2024 election from Trump to Harris. Some of them, for instance, involve mucking with how many electors states get. Remember, the number of electors a state gets is the number of Representatives they have plus two. And the number of representatives is determined by another enigmatic formula. (In 2020, if either New York—a state with nearly 20 million residents—had 89 more people, they would have received an extra House member.)

How can we put this arcana to use? Well, El Paso County, TX, has around 850,000 people, so moving it into New Mexico causes Texas to lose an elector and New Mexico to gain one. Similarly, moving Clark County (Las Vegas), NV, has around 2.3 million residents, so moving it into Arizona causes Nevada to lose 3 electors and Arizona to gain them. If we then flip Arizona blue by moving San Diego and Imperial County, CA, to Arizona, Harris wins 270-268.

How to flip Arizona blue and give it some extra votes.

As I said in 2020:

There are manymanymany reasons, to dislike the Electoral College, but to me this instability of the results due to small changes in the map is the most egregious. State lines were drawn for all sorts of reasons ranging from geographic pragmatism (a river runs along the border) to 19th Century compromises involving slavery (the Missouri Compromise chief among them) and bad legal drafting (see the Toledo War). And while gerrymandering is bad, there’s more method to that madness than Alabama failing for 100 years to get the Florida panhandle to secede.

But all of this leaves us with the question of what we should do to fix the problem that is the Electoral College. Short of moving to a better constitutional system like the one New Zealand uses, I think the solution is simple: just let the popular vote winner be president. It’s simple, equitable, and obviously democratic. There’s even one weird trick called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact that would get us there if only a couple more states would sign on.

In 2024, there are perhaps more pressing issues facing our democracy than the exact contours of the electoral system. But that we have not fixed this problem at the very core of the republic—one which has been obvious to at least a generation of political leaders and which continues to provide new opportunities for shenanigans—reflects our systems' inability to do hard things even when a large majority agrees it should be done.