United States presidential election in New Jersey, 2016 (Ferguson Scenario)



The 2016 United States presidential election in New Jersey took place on November 8, 2016. All fifty states and the District of Columbia, were part of the 2016 United States presidential election. New Jersey voters chose fourteen electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice-president.

New Jersey was won overwhelmingly by the Democratic nominees, incumbent President Henry T. Ferguson of Texas and his running mate Vice-President Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. Ferguson and Pryor defeated the Republican nominees, Senator William H. Pryor, Jr. of Alabama and his running mate Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

Ferguson carried New Jersey in a landslide with 65.61 percent of the vote to Pryor's 33.86 percent, a margin of 31.75 percentage points.

Ferguson also swept all twenty-one of New Jersey's counties, only the second time in history that a Democratic presidential candidate has done so. He was the first Democrat to carry Morris County, Sussex County, Hunterdon County, and Warren County since Lyndon B. Johnson had done so in the 1964 election. New Jersey was one of ten states where Ferguson won every county.

Ferguson broke sixty percent of the vote in ten counties, and seventy percent in three: Camden, Essex, and Hudson. Hudson would be the most Democratic county, giving Ferguson 78.7 percent of the vote. Pryor's strongest county was exurban Hunterdon County, where he received 49.0 percent of the vote to Ferguson's 50.1%.

New Jersey by this time was usually a swing state with a slight Republican lean. But this normal pattern was broken in 2016, as Pryor's staunch conservatism led many moderate Northeastern Republicans to view Pryor as an extremist and defect to the Democrats that year. As Ferguson won a massive landslide nationally, normally GOP-leaning New Jersey's result would even be almost 10 percentage points more Democratic than the national average.