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



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 President Henry T. Ferguson, who was running against Republican Senator William H. Pryor, Jr. of Alabama. Ferguson ran with Vice-President Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Pryor ran with Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

Ferguson carried the state in a historic landslide, taking 68.56 percent of the vote to Pryor's 31.31 percent, a victory margin of 37.25%. This is only the second election in history in which a Democratic presidential candidate has won every single county in the State of New York, following the 1964 election. Ferguson 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. He was only the second Democrat in history to win Allegany, Genesee, Livingston, Orleans, Tioga, Wayne, and Wyoming Counties, following Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. He was also the first Democrat, since Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968, to win Hamilton and Greene Counties, and the first since 1964 to win Putnam and Steuben Counties also.

This result also made Ferguson 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 Johnson in 1964.

New York weighed in for this election as 15 percent more Democratic than the national average.

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

Henry Ferguson carried all five boroughs of New York City, the first presidential candidate to do so since the landslide re-election of Al Gore in 2004. In the boroughs of the Bronx and Manhattan, Ferguson broke 90% of the vote. He was the first Democrat ever to break that mark in Manhattan. Brooklyn and Queens voted more than 80% Democratic. Even Staten Island voted Democratic, the first time that it did so since native son Mario Cuomo won it in 1996, and only the second time since World War II that it has done so. Overall, New York City gave Ferguson about 83% of the vote, a record for a Democratic presidential candidate. With 2,275,379 votes from the five boroughs, Ferguson also received more votes in New York City than any other presidential candidate in history.

Ferguson won the election in New York with a powerful 37-point sweep-out landslide. The staunch conservative William Pryor was widely seen in the liberal New England states as a right-wing extremist; he had voted against the Criminal Justice Reform Act of 2016, and the Ferguson campaign portrayed him as a warmonger who would carpet-bomb the Middle East. Thus Pryor performed especially weakly in liberal northeastern states such as New York, and indeed, he wrote off this state and neighboring Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Michigan from the beginning of his presidential campaign. By September, polls suggested Ferguson would carry the Empire State by forty percentage points-a result which proved startlingly accurate.

Ferguson won every Northeastern state in 2016 with landslides of more than sixty percent of the vote, including New York, which weighed in as the fifth most Democratic state in the nation.

However, the results of this election in New York are typical of President Ferguson's almost universal popularity across the United States at this time. The only region of the United States that did not send electors for Ferguson was the Deep South, where Pryor won his home state of Alabama, along with the states of Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Ferguson's socially liberal and racially tolerant position on criminal justice issues helped to bolster his position in New York, in contrast to Pryor's socially conservative views, which were received very negatively in this internationalist and diverse state.

Ferguson's 68.56 percent of the vote remains the highest percentage any presidential candidate has ever received in New York. His 37.25 percent victory margin is the second widest for any presidential candidate as well, behind only Warren G. Harding's 37.61 percent margin in the 1920 Republican landslide.