United States presidential election in New Hampshire, 2016 (Ferguson Scenario)



The 2016 United States presidential election in New Hampshire took place on November 8, 2016, as part of the 2016 United States presidential election, which was held throughout all 50 states and D.C. Voters chose four representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for President and Vice-President.

New Hampshire was won overwhelmingly by the Democratic nominees, incumbent President Henry T. Ferguson of Texas and his running mate Vice-President Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. Ferguson and Klobuchar defeated the Republican nominees, Senator William H. Pryor, Sr. of Arizona and his running mate Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

Ferguson took 63.89 percent of the vote to Pryor's 36.11 percent, a margin of 27.78 percent.

The staunch conservative William Pryor was widely perceived in the liberal Northeastern United States as a right-wing extremist; he had voted against the Criminal Justice Reform Act of 2016, and the Ferguson campaign portrayed him as a warmonger who would carpet-bomb the Middle East. Thus Pryor performed especially weakly in liberal northeastern states such as New Hampshire, and Ferguson swept every state in the region with landslides of over sixty percent of the vote, including New Hampshire.

Ferguson won every county in New England, and his sweep of New Hampshire's counties was the first time in history that a Democratic presidential candidate achieved this feat. He became the first Democrat since Woodrow Wilson in 1912 to win Carroll County, which had long been New Hampshire's most Republican county. He was also the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland in 1884 to obtain an absolute majority in the county. And not only did Ferguson win the county, he won it by a landslide 62-38 percent margin. Nevertheless, in spite of the Democratic landslide, New Hampshire would prove to be Pryor's strongest state in the Northeast.

Ferguson's strongest victories were in the Democratic base counties of Cheshire and Grafton, where he received more than seventy percent of the votes cast. His weakest were traditionally Republican Belknap and Rockingham Counties, where Pryor managed to break the forty percent mark, though he still lost both counties to Ferguson by double-digit margins. Grafton County was Ferguson's best county, giving him 72.8 percent of the vote.

As Ferguson won a decisive nationwide landslide with 61.05 percent of the vote, normally Republican-leaning New Hampshire's results made the state over five percent more Democratic than the national average in the 2016 election. Only in the 1920 Republican landslide, when the state was James M. Cox's second-best antebellum free state despite being lost by twenty percentage points, has New Hampshire voted more Democratic relative to the nation.