Talk:United States presidential election, 2016 (Alternate Version)

Notes on the 2016 Presidential Election

William Rutherford's triumph in the 2016 election was achieved by breaking through ideological, regional, and economic lines that had remained firm for the Republican Party. At the same time, Rutherford drew massive support from all of the traditional Democratic voting blocs and metropolitan machines to obtain large majorities in the nation's biggest cities. Only a large defection of Republican to Rutherford-based generally on fears that Leach was too unpredictable to be trusted with leadership of the free world-could account for Rutherford's sweep of the Northeast, Midwest, and West.

Rutherford demolished Leach throughout the Northeast, cleaning up among college-educated and non college-educated whites alike. He carried every single county in New England, making this the first time since 1924 that a presidential candidate from either party had achieved this feat. Rutherford broke into most of the traditionally Republican towns and countryside. Notably, of Connecticut's 169 towns, the President won all but eleven, achieving the best performance for a Democrat there in over half a century. He became the first Democrat in history to win Carroll County, New Hampshire, long the most Republican county in that state. New Englanders were repelled by Leach's fiercely reactionary social views, particularly his rhetoric on issues such as trade, immigration, and the military, and they were alarmed by his attacks on Social Security and federal aid for education. It thus proved easy for them to throw their support to the President, whose administration had overseen the winding down of military conflicts throughout the Middle East, to the benefit of the United States. For very similar reasons, Rutherford achieved an unprecedented level of success in New York and New Jersey, sweeping every single county in both states. In Pennsylvania, he won all but four-Lebanon, Snyder, Union, and Wayne Counties.

Leach's ambitions to slash farm supports, downgrade the Rural Electrification Administration, and rollback Medicaid expansion helped lead to his poor showing in the rural Midwest. Rutherford swept every single county in Illinois, becoming the first Democrat ever to accomplish that feat. He won noted Republican bastions Lee County and Ogle County; the former had not voted Democratic since 1852, whereas the latter had never done so, thus making him the first Democrat to carry that county. Rutherford carried some rural areas of Wisconsin by an unprecedented 60%. He won North Dakota's Ward County-which had gone to Romney in 2012-by a margin of 2 to 1. At the same time, Rutherford also knocked down the traditional Republican margins in Midwest suburban areas, carrying such bastions as Oakland County, Michigan, Waukesha County, Wisconsin, DuPage, Lake, and Kane Counties, Illinois, and St. Louis County, Missouri. In the Rocky Mountain states and the Far West, Republican strength collapsed in the months after Leach's nomination, and Rutherford-helped no doubt by Vice-President Sanchez-was able to come across as more authentically Western than Leach. Leach's proposals, moreover, were seen as harmful to defense-oriented industry and to coveted programs of federal aid. In the Upper South, Leach's medicaid, rural development, and education plans were received with particular opprobrium by the region's residents, and Rutherford obtained huge percentages in many rural counties throughout Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Leach also did extremely poorly in much of rural Oklahoma and Texas.

Rutherford's greatest triumphs, however, came in the nation's large cities. He cracked even such Republican metropolitan areas as Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Oklahoma City, where the GOP suffered from lack of organization and apathy towards Leach. Yet despite the prediction of a huge Rutherford victory, Democratic ward leaders proved far from complacent, turning out their labor and minority blocs in spectacular fashion to provide comfortable voting cushions. Rutherford won a 334,940-vote margin in Philadelphia, some 70,000 better then he had done four years earlier. He won New York City by a whopping 1,228,249, Baltimore by 124,490. He led by some 950,630 in Chicago, 408,579 in Detroit, 139,373 in Milwaukee, 1,215,058 in Los Angeles.