November 8, 2016 2020 → 5 0 68.5% 26.4% | Turnout 57.45% 489,371 188,794 | |
The 2016 United States presidential election in West Virginia was held on November 8, 2016, as part of the 2016 General Election in which all 50 states plus The District of Columbia participated. West Virginia voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote pitting the Republican Party's nominee, businessman Donald Trump, and running mate Indiana Governor Mike Pence against Democratic Party nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine.
Contents
On May 10, 2016, in the presidential primaries, West Virginia voters expressed their preferences for the Democratic, Republican, Green, and Libertarian parties' respective nominees for President. Registered members of each party only voted in their party's primary, while voters who were unaffiliated chose any one primary in which to vote.
Donald Trump easily won West Virginia with 68.7% of the vote, giving him his largest margin of victory in the country. Hillary Clinton received 26.5% of the vote. West Virginia was also one of two states where Donald Trump won every county, the other being Oklahoma. Trump's 42.2% margin of victory is the largest of any presidential candidate from either party in the state's history, besting Abraham Lincoln's 36.4% margin of victory in 1864.
Bill Clinton, Clinton's husband and former United States President, had carried the state by more than 10 points in 1996. Since then it has swung almost 60 points against the Democrats.
Democratic primary
Six candidates appeared on the Democratic presidential primary ballot: (alphabetically)
Republican primary
Eleven candidates appeared on the Republican presidential primary ballot:
Analysis
As expected, Republican nominee Donald Trump won West Virginia in a 42-point routing (the largest of any presidential candidate in the state's history) over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, thanks to ardent support from coal industry workers in Appalachia. He thus captured all five electoral votes from the Mountain State. Trump had promised to bring back mining jobs in economically depressed areas of coal country, whereas his opponent had proposed investing millions into converting the region to a producer of green energy. Democrats' championing of environmentalism is viewed as a threat in coal country, and Clinton faced a towering rejection from Mountain State voters.
West Virginia was once a solidly Democratic state; it voted Democratic in every election from 1932 to 1996, except for the Republican landslides of 1956, 1972, and 1984. However, in recent years it has drifted to becoming solidly Republican, and has stayed that way since it was won by George W. Bush in 2000. Barack Obama, for example, failed to win even a single county in 2012. West Virginia is one of the two states where Hillary Clinton did not win any counties, the other being Oklahoma, which last voted for a Democrat in 1964.