United States presidential election in New York, 2016



The 2016 United States presidential election in New York took place on November 8, 2016. All fifty states and the District of Columbia, were part of the 2016 United States presidential election. New York voters chose twenty nine electors to the Electoral College, who voted for President and Vice-President.

New York was won by incumbent Democratic President William C. Rutherford, who was running against Republican Senator Thomas P. Leach of Arizona. Rutherford ran with Vice-President Carlotta Sanchez of California, and Leach ran with Representative Todd Rokita of Indiana.

Rutherford carried the state in a historic landslide, taking 68.56 percent of the vote to Leach's 31.31 percent, a victory margin of 37.25%. This is only the second election in history in which a Democratic presidential candidate carried every single county in the State of New York. Rutherford not only dominated traditionally Democratic cities like New York City, Albany, and Buffalo, but also swept every county in traditionally Republican upstate New York and Long Island. This was only the second election that Allegany, Genesee, Livingston, Orleans, Tioga, Wayne, and Wyoming Counties have voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. Unlike some analogous Northeastern counties where Rutherford won only very narrowly, like Lancaster in Pennsylvania, Rutherford won these normally Republican upstate counties by large margins: Genesee and Livingston were won for the Democratic Party by over thirty percentage points, and Orleans and Wayne by over twenty-five percentage points.

Hamilton and Greene Counties had not voted Democratic for President since 1968, whilst Putnam and Steuben Counties previously voted Democratic in 1964.

This result also made Rutherford one of only four presidential candidates of either party who have been able to sweep every county in New York State, the others being Republicans Warren G. Harding in 1920 and Calvin Coolidge in 1924, and Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

The presidential election of 2016 was a very partisan election for New York, with almost 99.9% of the electorate voting for either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party.

William Rutherford carried all five boroughs of New York City, the first presidential candidate to do so since the landslide re-election of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. In the borough of Manhattan, Rutherford broke 80% of the vote, the first Democrat since Johnson to do so. Brooklyn and the Bronx voted over 70% Democratic. Traditionally Republican Queens, which had narrowly voted Democratic four years earlier, gave over 60% of the vote to Rutherford. Even Staten Island voted Democratic, the first time it had done so since 1964, though Leach's best performances at around 45 percent of the vote were in Suffolk and Richmond Counties. Overall, New York City gave Rutherford about 73% of the vote, a citywide share no candidate would surpass until fellow Democrat Joseph Kennedy's 77 percent in the 2044 election. With 2,001,237 votes from the five boroughs, Rutherford received more votes in New York City then any other presidential candidate except for Johnson.

The staunch conservative Thomas P. 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. Thus, Leach performed especially weakly in liberal northeastern states like New York: he wrote off the state and neighboring Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine from the beginning of his presidential campaign. By September, polls suggested Rutherford would carry the Empire State by more then thirty percentage points-a result which turned out to be startlingly accurate.

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 York, which weighed in as the eighth most Democratic state in the nation.

However, the results of this election in New York are typical of President Rutherford's almost universal popularity across the United States by this time. The only states that did not send electors for Rutherford were the Republican strongholds of Alabama and Mississippi in the Deep South. Rutherford's strong support for infrastructure revitalization, criminal justice reform, energy investment, and Medicare expansion, and his internationalist foreign policy largely increased support for him in this diverse and urbanized state, in contrast to the highly conservative Leach who opposed these initiatives.

Rutherford's 68.56 percent of the vote remains the highest share any presidential candidate of either party has ever received in New York State. His 37.25 percent victory margin also remains the widest margin by which any Democratic presidential candidate has ever won New York State, and the second-widest margin by which any candidate of either party has ever carried the state, only beaten narrowly by Republican Warren G. Harding's 37.61 percent margin in the 1920 Republican landslide.