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 nominee, businessman Donald Trump, and running mate Indiana Governor Mike Pence against Democratic nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. Trump won West Virginia with 68.5% of the vote, his largest vote share in any state during the election. Clinton received just over a quarter of the vote, with 26.4%.
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.
Primary elections
Democratic primary
Six candidates appeared on the Democratic presidential primary ballot
(alphabetically):
- Hillary Clinton
- Rocky De La Fuente
- Paul T. Farrell Jr.
- Keith Judd
- Martin O'Malley (withdrawn)
- Bernie Sanders
Republican primary
Eleven candidates appeared on the Republican presidential primary ballot:
- Jeb Bush (withdrawn)
- Ben Carson (withdrawn)
- Chris Christie (withdrawn)
- Ted Cruz (withdrawn)
- Carly Fiorina (withdrawn)
- Mike Huckabee (withdrawn)
- John Kasich (withdrawn)
- Rand Paul (withdrawn)
- Marco Rubio (withdrawn)
- Donald Trump
General election
Results
By congressional district
Trump won all three congressional districts.
Analysis
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 industry workers in Appalachia. He thus captured all five electoral votes from West Virginia. With a 15.41% swing to Trump, West Virginia had the second largest swing to Trump after North Dakota.
In addition to being his strongest state in the election and scoring what was at the time the best vote share for a presidential candidate in the state's history, West Virginia was one of two states where Trump won every county, the other being Oklahoma. This was the second consecutive presidential election where every county in the state voted Republican. Trump's 42.1% 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. He would be unable to best this record margin of victory in his subsequent presidential runs in 2020 and 2024 despite earning 68.62% and 69.97% of the vote, respectively, both of them greater vote shares than his 2016 performance.
Clinton's performance was the worst by a major party nominee since 1912, when three candidates split the vote and received over 20% of the vote each. As of 2024, it also remains the worst performance ever by a Democrat in West Virginia. Clinton won fewer votes in the general election than were cast in her party's primary overall, as well as fewer votes than she received in the 2008 state primary. Clinton also received the fewest votes for a Democrat in a West Virginia presidential election since 1916, exactly 100 years prior.
West Virginia is one of the least-educated states in the country, with only one county having at least 40% of its adult residents with a bachelor's degree. That county, Monongalia County (home to West Virginia University), had the smallest swing to Trump out of any county in the state. The rest of the state swung massively to Trump.
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, while describing the transition to sustainable 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.
The change to increasing Republican control had also been reflected at the state level. While West Virginia was one of several states with a Democratic governor (Earl Ray Tomblin) in 2016 where Trump won, Republicans had won both chambers of the state legislature in the 2014 elections. In the ensuing years, more statewide executive offices also were won by Republican candidates.