United States presidential election in Rhode Island, 2016



The '2016 United States presidential election in Rhode Island 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.

Rhode Island 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 Rhode Island in a landslide, taking 80.87% of the vote to Leach's 19.13%, a Democratic victory margin of 61.74%. This made Rhode Island William Rutherford's strongest state in the nation: even in the midst of a massive nationwide Democratic landslide, Rhode Island weighed in as 37 percent more Democratic than the national average during the 2016 election.

The staunch conservative Leach was widely seen in the 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 a nuclear war. While Rutherford had won 63.63 percent in Rhode Island in 2012 mostly by mobilizing the Democratic base, for 2016, this traditional Democratic coalition was joined by mass defections of moderate Yankee Republicans who had voted for Romney but could not support the extremist Leach. His landslide was so large, he won a record 375,353 votes, a record that still hasn't been beat. Consequently, the incumbent Rutherford was able to take more than eighty percent of the vote in liberal Rhode Island.

Rutherford swept all five counties in Rhode Island with over seventy percent of the vote. In Providence County, the most populated county, home to the state's capital and largest city, Providence, Rutherford took an epic 83.5% of the vote. This was the strongest showing ever for a Democratic presidential candidate in Providence.

Rutherford's 80.87 percent remains the highest vote share percentage any presidential candidate of either party has ever received in Rhode Island, and his 61.74 percent victory margin remains the widest margin by which any candidate of either party has ever won the state. In fact, since 2020 no state of the Union has ever given any candidate so large a proportion of the vote.