United States presidential election in New Hampshire, 2016



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 William C. Rutherford of Texas and his running mate Vice-President Carlotta Sanchez of California. Rutherford and Sanchez defeated the Republican nominees, Senator Thomas P. Leach of Arizona and his running mate Congressman Todd Rokita of Indiana.

The staunch conservative Thomas P. Leach was widely perceived in the liberal Northeastern United States as a right-wing extremist; he had voted against the Criminal Justice Reform Act, and the Rutherford campaign portrayed him as a warmonger who as President would provoke nuclear war. Thus Leach performed especially weakly in liberal Northeastern states such as New Hampshire, 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 them all with landslides of over sixty percent of the vote, including New Hampshire.

Rutherford became the first Democrat in history to sweep all of New Hampshire's counties, a feat which Lyndon B. Johnson had failed to accomplish against Barry Goldwater in 1964. Rutherford was the first Democrat since 1912 to carry Carroll County, which had been the most Republican county in New Hampshire for generations, having voted over seventy percent Republican in 2008 and over sixty percent Republican in 2012. In 2016, Rutherford won the county in a landslide with 64 percent of the vote, becoming the first Democrat since 1884 to earn an absolute majority there and the first since 1876 to win it by a double-digit margin. That year, Leach did not win a single county throughout all of New England; indeed, he did not win a single county in all of the Northeastern United States, except for four which he carried in Pennsylvania. Despite the landslide loss, New Hampshire would prove to be Rutherford's weakest state in the Northeast.

Throughout the remainder of the state, Rutherford won by decisive margins, with his strongest victories being in the Democratic base counties of Cheshire County, Merrimack County, and Stafford County. The former two counties had trended strongly towards the Democratic Party since the turn of the millennium, while Stafford County was an ancestral Democratic stronghold, dating back to the days of the New Deal. Stafford County, in fact, was Rutherford's strongest county in the state, where he took 72 percent of the vote. He broke sixty percent in every county in New Hampshire, making this one of three New England states (alongside Connecticut and Rhode Island), where he did so.

As Rutherford won a decisive nationwide landslide with 62.28 percent of the vote, normally Republican-leaning New Hampshire's results made the state ten 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, and in the 1964 Democratic landslide, has New Hampshire voted more Democratic relative to the nation.