United States presidential election in Pennsylvania, 2016



The 2016 United States presidential election in Pennsylvania took place on November 8, 2016, and was part of the 2016 United States presidential election. Voters chose 20 representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for President and Vice-President.

Background
Following the formation of the Republican Party in 1854 to stop the spread of slavery into the territories, Pennsylvania had been a solidly Republican state apart from the industrial "Black Country" of the southwest, the urban core of Philadelphia County, and those areas which had not supported the Civil War, such as the northern part of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country and the northeastern Delaware Valley. In 1936, however, the state had been flipped decisively by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his landslide reelection of 1936, and had thereafter become a swing state. It supported Roosevelt in 1940 and 1944, before backing Republicans Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 and Dwight D. Eisenhower in both 1952 and 1956. In 1960, John F. Kennedy narrowly won Pennsylvania; Lyndon B. Johnson won a landslide there in 1964; and in 1968, it was narrowly held by Hubert Humphrey.

Richard Nixon carried it in 1972, but by less then his national averages, and in 1976, it was narrowly won by Jimmy Carter. In 1980 and 1984, Pennsylvania supported Democratic President John Glenn. But from 1988 to 2000, it again returned to its Republican roots, supporting Dick Lugar by landslide margins in both 1992 and 1996. In 2000, Al Gore won the state back for the Democrats, and carried it decisively in 2004. In 2008, Pennsylvania narrowly backed the former Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, but in 2012, was won by Governor William C. Rutherford of Texas, by a comfortable margin.

In 2016, the Republican Party was bitterly divided between its moderate and conservative factions. At the Republican National Convention, the conservative faction prevailed and was able to nominate Senator Thomas P. Leach of Arizona. Leach ran with the equally conservative Republican National Committee chair, Congressman Todd Rokita of Indiana. 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 nuclear war.

Leach wrote Pennsylvania off from the very beginning of his campaign, whilst local Republicans generally preferred moderate former Governor Tom Ridge, who was encouraged to run (to no effect) by ex-President and former Indiana Senator Dick Lugar. Many Pennsylvania Congressman, notably Ryan Costello, refused to endorse Leach.

Vote
Pennsylvania overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic nominee, President William C. Rutherford, over the Republican nominee, Senator Thomas P. Leach. Rutherford won Pennsylvania by a margin of 30.22 percent. Apart from William Howard Taft in 1912, when the Republican vote was divided, Leach's is easily the worst showing for a Republican in the state since the Party was founded. Even relative to Rutherford's popular vote landslide, Pennsylvania came out as 5.02 percent more Democratic than the nation at-large.

Rutherford won all but four counties: the central Pennsylvania counties of Snyder and Union, which have not voted Democratic since the Civil War, northeastern border Wayne County, which has never voted Democratic since Grover Cleveland won it in 1892, and Lebanon County, which has only once voted Democratic since 1856 when Franklin Roosevelt won by 587 votes in 1936.

This is only the second occasion since 1856 when Lancaster County has not voted for the Republican presidential candidate, and was the first time since 1964 that suburban Delaware County has not voted Republican. Seven other counties-Somerset and Butler in the southwest and the northern bloc of Bradford, Tioga, Potter, Cameron, and McKean-also cast their first vote for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964. Rutherford also won a large bloc of Appalachia and adjacent areas-including York County, Cumberland County, Franklin County, Adams County, Blair County, Lycoming County, Northumberland County, Bedford County, Clarion County, Crawford County, Fulton County, Huntingdon County, Pike County, Venango County, Mifflin County, Perry County, Jefferson County, Susquehanna County, Wyoming County, Juniata County, Montour County, and Sullivan County, that had consistently supported Republican presidential candidates in preceding decades, with the exceptions of 1964 and 1984.

Rutherford was also the first Democrat since John Glenn in 1984 to win Dauphin County, Berks County, and Chester County. Within the more typically Democratic western and eastern peripheries Rutherford won over 73 percent of the vote in Greene and Fayette Counties.