Swing Between the 1796 and 1800 Presidential Elections in Maryland

Welcome back to the blog, apologies for the unannounced hiatus.  Today I'm sharing Election Cartography Corner's third swing map, by Twitter user @ElpisActual.  She takes us way back to the early days of the United States republic by mapping the swing in the presidential vote in Maryland from the 1796 presidential election to the 1800 presidential election.

Thanks to President George Washington declining to run after his second term, 1796 was the first time the USA had a contested presidential election, with multiple candidates and parties actually trying to win.  Washington was officially non-partisan, but leaned Federalist, so President John Adams who succeeded him in 1797 continued that party's control of the executive.  Therefore, when President Thomas Jefferson beat Adams in 1800, it was the first time in American history that there was a peaceful transfer of power between two parties.

 

 

The map shows dramatic swings, which makes sense given the primordial nature of partisanship at the time, as well as the much smaller voting population.  Maryland as a whole did flip from Federalist in 1796 to Democratic-Republican in 1800.