United States presidential election in Massachusetts, 2016



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

Massachusetts 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 incumbent Vice President Carlotta Sanchez of California, while Leach's running mate was Congressman Todd Rokita of Indiana.

Rutherford carried Massachusetts in a mega landslide, taking a whopping 76.19 percent of the vote to Leach's 23.44 percent, a Democratic victory margin of 52.74 percent. This made it the third most Democratic state in the nation, after Rhode Island and Hawaii. However, these three states traditionally go Democratic as well in elections with weaker Democratic candidates.

Massachusetts had been a Democratic-leaning state since 1928, transitioning into a Democratic stronghold after 1996, when John McCain had narrowly won the state in his reelection bid. In 2000 and 2004, Al Gore had won the state by double digits over his Republican opponents; in 2008, Vice-President John Kerry had comfortably carried his home state over its former Governor, Mitt Romney; and in 2012, Rutherford himself had received 63 percent of the vote in the state against Romney. That had been the strongest Democratic performance in Massachusetts since Hubert Humphrey's triumph over Richard Nixon in 1968. Rutherford, however, overtook this record in 2016.

While Rutherford had won over sixty percent in 2012 primarily by mobilizing the Democratic base, in 2016, the traditional Democratic coalition was joined by mass defections of moderate Yankee Republicans who had voted for Romney but could not support the extremist Leach. Consequently, the incumbent Rutherford was able to take more than three-quarters of the vote in liberal Massachusetts and indeed Leach wrote this state and neighboring Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire off from the beginning of his presidential campaign.

Rutherford swept every county in Massachusetts, the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had done so since John Glenn in 1984. He was the first Democrat since Glenn to win Barnstable County, and only the third Democrat, following Johnson and Glenn, to win Nantucket County. In Suffolk County, home to the state's capital and largest city, Boston, Rutherford took an epic 86.2 percent of the vote, making this only the second election in which a presidential candidate of any part has broken 80 percent in Suffolk County.

This is also only the second election in which a Democrat has broken seventy percent of the vote in Massachusetts. Rutherford's 76.19 percent remains the highest vote share any presidential candidate of either party has ever received in the state, and his 52.74 percent margin of victory is the widest margin by which any presidential candidate of either party has ever carried the state.