United States presidential election in Massachusetts, 2016 (Ferguson Scenario)



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 eleven representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for President and Vice-President.

Massachusetts voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic nominee, incumbent President Henry T. Ferguson of Texas, over the Republican nominee, Senator William H. Pryor, Jr. of Alabama. Ferguson ran with Vice-President Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, while Pryor's running mate was Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

Ferguson carried Massachusetts in a landslide, taking 76.19 percent of the vote to Pryor's 23.44 percent, a Democratic victory margin of 52.75 percent. This made it the third most Democratic state in the nation, after Rhode Island and Hawaii.

Even in the midst of a massive nationwide Democratic landslide, Massachusetts still weighed in as thirty percent more Democratic than the national average.

Massachusetts has been a Democratic-leaning state since 1928, but voted Republican as recently as 2008, when Mitt Romney, formerly the state's Governor, managed to narrowly carry the state against his Democratic opponent, Joe Lieberman, that year. In 2012, however, the state had swung dramatically against the unpopular Romney, returning to its Democratic roots in force, and giving Senator Ferguson of Texas 60.22 percent of the popular vote. In 2016, Ferguson improved substantially upon his already strong performance in Massachusetts.

The staunch conservative William Pryor was widely seen in the liberal Northeastern United States as a right-wing extremist; he had voted against the Criminal Justice Reform Act of 2016, and the Ferguson campaign successfully portrayed him as a warmonger and as a Social Darwinist who would threaten Americans' hard-earned entitlements. Thus Pryor performed especially weakly in liberal northeastern states such as Massachusetts, and Ferguson swept every Northeastern state with landslides of than sixty percent of the vote, including Massachusetts, which weighed in as the third most Democratic state in the nation.

While Ferguson had won sixty percent in Massachusetts in 2012 largely by mobilizing normally Democratic urban, working-class, and younger voters, in 2016, this traditional Democratic coalition was joined by mass defections of moderate Yankee Republicans, including suburbanites and upper middle-class voters, who had voted for Romney but could not support the extremist Pryor. Consequently, the incumbent Ferguson was able to take more than three-quarters of the vote in liberal Massachusetts, and indeed Pryor wrote this state and neighboring Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan off from the beginning of his presidential campaign.

Ferguson swept every county in Massachusetts, only the third time in history that a Democratic presidential candidate has done so. He was the first Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 to win Plymouth County, and only the second to gain a majority in Barnstable County since Johnson, following Al Gore in 2004. In Suffolk County, home to the state's capital and largest city, Boston, Ferguson took 83.8 percent of the vote, the second-highest share for a Democratic presidential candidate there in history. He also received more than eighty percent of the ballots cast in rural Berkshire County and in island Dukes County. In every other county in the state, Ferguson received at least seventy percent of the vote.