2016 United States presidential election in West Virginia
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 mateIndiana GovernorMike Pence against Democratic Party nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. 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 68.5% of the vote, giving him his largest share of the vote in any state. Hillary Clinton received just over a quarter of the vote, with 26.4%. Trump's performance in the state made it his second strongest state in the 2016 election after Wyoming. West Virginia was also one of two states where Donald Trump won every county, the other being Oklahoma. This was the second consecutive presidential election where every county within the state voted Republican. 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. Hillary Clinton's performance was the worst by a nominee from a major party since 1912, when 3 candidates split the vote and received over 20% of the vote each, and the worst performance ever by a Democrat in West Virginia.
As expected, Republican nominee Donald Trump won West Virginia in a 42-point rout over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, thanks to ardent support from coal industryworkers 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. Clinton was also seen as being "haunted" by a comment she made within the state itself, in which in describing the transition to clean energy she stated "We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." 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.
