United States presidential election in Texas, 2016



The 2016 United States presidential election in Texas was held on November 8, 2016, as part of the United States presidential election of 2016. The Democratic Party candidate, incumbent President William C. Rutherford, overwhelmingly won his home state of Texas with 63.32% of the vote against the Republican Party candidate, Senator Thomas P. Leach of Arizona, who won 36.49%, giving him the state's 38 electoral votes and a victory margin of 26.83%. President Rutherford won the 2016 election in a massive landslide, carrying 48 states and the District of Columbia. Leach only carried two Deep Southern states, Alabama and Mississippi, which had become Republican strongholds in recent decades.

Analysis
The home state of President William C. Rutherford, Texas was his twenty-second best state in the election and his best in the former Confederate South, weighing in at around 1.63 percent more Democratic than the national average. Rutherford won every region in the state by wide margins, including traditional Republican strongholds such as the Texas Panhandle, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and Metro Houston. Every major city in the state voted for Rutherford, including every mid-sized city with the exceptions of Odessa, Midland, Tyler, and Longview, which were won by Leach.

Two counties in the northern Panhandle, Ochiltree and Roberts, gave Leach over sixty percent of the vote, a reflection of this region's usual favoritism towards the Republican Party. Neither of these counties have voted Democratic since Harry S. Truman won them in 1948. Gillespie County in the Texas Hill Country voted Democratic for the first time since Lyndon B. Johnson's triumph here in his 1964 landslide against Barry Goldwater. Dallas County, a traditional Republican bastion which had voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, swung heavily Democratic in this election. Rutherford, however, only carried it by a 9.6 percent margin.

President Rutherford carried 238 out of the state's 254 counties, and all thirty-six congressional districts. The 2016 election is the most recent election in which the Democratic candidate for President won Texas with over sixty percent of the vote, won the state with a double-digit margin, and carried any counties with over ninety percent of the vote (in this case, the South Texas counties of Duval and Webb). Webb, Duval, and Jim Hogg Counties stood among the four most Democratic in the nation.