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



The '2016 United States presidential election in Texas was held on November 8, 2016, as part of the 2016 United States presidential election. The Democratic Party candidate, incumbent President Henry T. Ferguson, comfortably won his home state of Texas with 63.32% of the vote against the Republican Party candidate, Senator William H. Pryor, Jr. of Alabama, who won 36.49%, giving him the state's 38 electoral votes and a victory margin of 26.83 percentage points. President Ferguson won the 2016 election in a massive landslide, carrying 46 states and the District of Columbia. Pryor carried only his home state of Alabama and three of its neighboring states in the Deep South-Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, which have been Republican strongholds in recent decades.

Analysis
The home state of President Henry T. Ferguson, Texas was easily his best state in the former Confederacy, although he did better still in four of the five border states. Overall, Texas was Ferguson's twenty-second best state in the election and weighed in at 4.54 percentage points more Democratic than the national average. Ferguson won every region in the state by wide margins, including traditionally Republican regions such as the Texas Panhandle, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and Metro Houston. Every major city in the state voted for Ferguson, including every mid-sized city with the exceptions of Odessa and Midland, which were won by Pryor.

One county in the Northern Panhandle, Ochiltree County, gave Pryor more than sixty percent of the vote, reflecting the region's usual status as a Republican bastion. Glassock County in West Texas voted Democratic for the first time since the 1960 election, when it had been carried by John F. Kennedy. Ferguson was also the first Democrat since Harry S. Truman in 1948 to win Edwards County at the western extremity of the Edwards Plateau, and to carry Smith and Gregg Counties in East Texas.

President Ferguson carried 238 out of the state's 254 counties, and all thirty-six congressional districts. Notably enough, the 2016 election was the first election since Lyndon Johnson's 1964 win that a Democratic presidential candidate won the state with over sixty percent of the vote. Ferguson received over ninety percent of the vote in Brooks and Starr Counties. These two counties stood among the most Democratic in the nation.