United States presidential election in Vermont, 2016



The 2016 United States presidential election in Vermont took place on November 8, 2016, as part of the 2016 United States presidential election which was held throughout all fifty states and the District of Columbia. Voters chose three representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for President and Vice-President.

Vermont voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic nominee, incumbent President William C. Rutherford of Texas, over the Republican nominee, Senator Thomas P. Leach of Arizona. Rutherford ran with Vice-President Carlotta Sanchez of California, while Leach's running mate was Congressman Todd Rokita of Indiana.

Rutherford won a landslide in Vermont with 74.73% of the vote to Leach's 23.04%, a Democratic victory margin of 51.69%.

Vermont historically was a bastion of liberal Northeastern Republicanism, and in every election from 1856 to 1960, the Green Mountain State had gone Republican. In 1964, however, the nomination of conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater had led the state to abandon its traditional allegiance to the Republicans for the first time in its history, and to support Lyndon Johnson by an overwhelming margin that year. Four years later, Vermont returned to its Republican loyalties, supporting Vice-President Richard Nixon, and subsequently voted Republican in every election thereafter for the remainder of the twentieth century, with the sole exception of 1984, when it was won by Democratic President John Glenn. By the turn of the millennium, however, with the national Republican Party making a more rightward turn, Vermont once again became friendly towards the Democrats. Al Gore won it by a narrow margin in 2000, which then expanded into a commanding majority in 2004. Vermont remained loyal to Vice-President John Kerry in 2008, and in 2012, it went in a landslide for Rutherford over incumbent President Mitt Romney. The nomination of Thomas P. Leach in 2016 accelerated the state's Democratic trend.

The staunch conservative Leach was widely seen in the liberal Northeastern United States as a right-wing extremist; he had voted against the Criminal Justice Reform Act of 2016, and the Rutherford campaign portrayed him as a warmonger who as President would provoke a nuclear war. Thus Leach performed especially weakly in liberal northeastern states like Vermont, and for only the third time in history, a Democratic presidential candidate swept every Northeastern state in 2016. Not only did Rutherford win every Northeastern state, but he won all of them with landslides of over sixty percent of the vote, including Vermont, which weighed in as the fourth most Democratic state in the nation.

Rutherford swept all eleven counties in Vermont, breaking seventy percent of the vote in nine of them. In two northeastern counties, Caledonia County and Essex County, the most Republican counties in the state, Leach managed to break forty percent of the vote, but nevertheless still lost both counties by double-digit margins to Rutherford. Rutherford's best county was Chittenden County, the most populous county, home to the state's largest city of Burlington, where he received 79 percent of the votes cast.

Rutherford's landslide win in Vermont was the strongest for a Democratic presidential candidate in history. His 74.73 percent vote share and his 51.69 percent vote margin have not been surpassed by any subsequent presidential candidate from either party.