Weirdest Presidental Election Result by state since 1960

[Alcibiades]

California 1972: McGovern was very popular among the anti-war/student/hippy crowd, and improved among them compared to Humphrey. Obviously nowhere near enough to win the state, but enough, in combination with the traditional New Deal Democratic constituency in the NE to make it more Dem than the nation. As mentioned before, CA was more Lean R than Solid R.

Hawaii 1976: Due to its militarily perilous fur-flung location, Hawaii has a strong pro-incumbent lean, especially back then when it was a relatively new state and far less set in its voting patterns.

Maine 2016: Same reason Trump did well in the Midwest (WWC support).

Massachusetts 1980: Anderson had one of his best performances here, mostly taking vites from Carter.

Mississippi 1980: Very inelastic, racially polarised state, less likely to swing with the nation. But even that might not be all of the story.

Montana 2008: Obama made a play for the state as part of his 50-state strategy. It was the kind of elastic, non-Southern mixture of well-educated whites and WWC state that was a decent fit for him. Similar reasons as to why he overperformed in the Dakotas (both rural Western Republican states which elected lots of Democratic senators). In some ways, it’s surprising he won Indiana and not Montana.

Nevada 2008: Hit very hard by the financial crisis.

New York 2016: Upstate is like most of the rural Midwestern areas Trump did very well in.

Oklahoma 1960: One of the staunchest anti-Catholic states, so voted against JFK. Less of an ancestral attachment to the Democrats than some of the anti-Catholic Deep South states.

Pennsylvania 1984: Mondale had a solid base among the WWC voters of SW Pennsylvania, who stayed much more Democratic than the suburban working class Reagan Democrats in places like Macomb County, as they did not benefit from Reaganomics.

Rhode Island 1972: Massachusetts was more college-educated than Rhode Island, which had a more working class flavour. McGovern did much better among the former group than the latter.

South Carolina 1968: Strom Thurmond’s influence; a man very popular among the state’s segregationists who campaigned pretty hard for Nixon. Also, SC was more economically conservative than other Southern states. Humphrey actually did better here than the other Deep South states as black turnout was the highest of any of them.

Texas 1968: LBJ is probably part of it. Also had much more of a liberal tradition than most other Southern states, electing people like Ralph Yarborough.

Utah 2016: Trump alienated a lot of conservative Mormons.

Virginia 1976: The factors that mean Democrats do well there today (most ‘Northern’ of the Southern states, affluent suburbs) worked in Ford’s favour in 1976.

West Virginia 1972: See Rhode Island explanation.

[Alcibiades]

1960: NV
1964: FL
1968: TX
1972: MA
1976: VA
1980: MA
1984: MN
1988: MD
1992: VT
1996: CO
2000: NH
2004: NM
2008: IN
2012: FL
2016: MI

I would say that New Hampshire, which unlike Vermont which was more Republican than the nation in 84 and 88 (and significantly so), was the much weirder result in 1992.

[Alcibiades]

1980, as has been alluded to on here before when discussing the result in Arkansas, certainly did have many strange state-by-state results. Reagan did exceptionally well in his native region (the West), winning almost every state of that region (except for Hawaii) by double digits, and exceeding 60% or even 70% of the vote in many of those states. Most of the South, conversely, was extremely close, with Reagan garnering a majority in a select few states (Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia). But one result that's particularly interesting, and which I've taken note of just recently, is Maryland.

This is the county map for the state that year:

A glance at the map would make it seem that Reagan won the state, given that he carried the majority of the counties, including Baltimore, Howard, and Montgomery Counties. I've watched old NBC News Election Night coverage on YouTube, and Reagan was actually leading in the state for much of the night until late returns gave Carter the advantage. However, a closer look reveals how Carter managed to win Maryland. Baltimore, Howard, and Montgomery Counties only went to Reagan with pluralities, with John Anderson drawing away a significant number of votes from Reagan. But most importantly of all, Carter won Baltimore City over Reagan by more than 50%, garnering over 70% of the vote there. His margin of 134,009 there more than accounted for his 45,555 margin in the state as a whole.

Reagan's weakness with black voters probably helps to explain why he lost Maryland, and in particular, why he lost Baltimore by so much. In the corresponding Senatorial race, Charles Mathias won Baltimore by 13% and swept every county in the state, while getting 66%. There was much ticket-splitting in Maryland that year, with Mathias winning over substantial numbers of Carter voters, including many black Democrats (although a majority stayed Republican).

Another weird Maryland result was 1988. It was the only time the state has voted Republican outside of a 49-state blowout since 1956. It can probably be explained by the fact that Dukakis got absolutely crushed among white suburbanites, and Bush’s dog-whistles about African-American criminals may have played particularly well in white Maryland considering the state’s high black population.

Dukakis actually did better than Carter in Montgomery and PG Counties, however he did much worse in Anne Arundel, Howard and Baltimore Counties and pretty much the rest of the entire state, including its rural areas. The two did about the same in Baltimore City, but its population declined between 1980 and 1988.

[Alcibiades]

1980, as has been alluded to on here before when discussing the result in Arkansas, certainly did have many strange state-by-state results. Reagan did exceptionally well in his native region (the West), winning almost every state of that region (except for Hawaii) by double digits, and exceeding 60% or even 70% of the vote in many of those states. Most of the South, conversely, was extremely close, with Reagan garnering a majority in a select few states (Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia). But one result that's particularly interesting, and which I've taken note of just recently, is Maryland.

This is the county map for the state that year:

A glance at the map would make it seem that Reagan won the state, given that he carried the majority of the counties, including Baltimore, Howard, and Montgomery Counties. I've watched old NBC News Election Night coverage on YouTube, and Reagan was actually leading in the state for much of the night until late returns gave Carter the advantage. However, a closer look reveals how Carter managed to win Maryland. Baltimore, Howard, and Montgomery Counties only went to Reagan with pluralities, with John Anderson drawing away a significant number of votes from Reagan. But most importantly of all, Carter won Baltimore City over Reagan by more than 50%, garnering over 70% of the vote there. His margin of 134,009 there more than accounted for his 45,555 margin in the state as a whole.

Reagan's weakness with black voters probably helps to explain why he lost Maryland, and in particular, why he lost Baltimore by so much. In the corresponding Senatorial race, Charles Mathias won Baltimore by 13% and swept every county in the state, while getting 66%. There was much ticket-splitting in Maryland that year, with Mathias winning over substantial numbers of Carter voters, including many black Democrats (although a majority stayed Republican).

Another weird Maryland result was 1988. It was the only time the state has voted Republican outside of a 49-state blowout since 1956. It can probably be explained by the fact that Dukakis got absolutely crushed among white suburbanites, and Bush’s dog-whistles about African-American criminals may have played particularly well in white Maryland considering the state’s high black population.

Dukakis actually did better than Carter in Montgomery and PG Counties, however he did much worse in Anne Arundel, Howard and Baltimore Counties and pretty much the rest of the entire state, including its rural areas. The two did about the same in Baltimore City, but its population declined between 1980 and 1988.

1988 is certainly perplexing in many ways. In addition to Maryland, Bush held Pennsylvania-another single-digit win for Reagan in 1984-largely thanks to the "Willie Horton issue", as I would phrase it, and it also enabled him to win Illinois (which had been a 13% win for Reagan), but he lost New York and Iowa-two other single-digit Reagan wins. Iowa was relatively unaffected by the Willie Horton issue and reacted strongly to the Farm Crisis of that decade-which is also why it was more Democratic than the national average in 1984.

In New England, Bush narrowly held Vermont-which was a 16% win for Reagan in 1984, but was more Democratic than the national average at that point and was trending leftwards because of increasing Republican conservatism on social issues-and did almost as well as Reagan in Maine and New Hampshire (the latter state was poerfully Republican then). But he lost Rhode Island by low double digits and only won Connecticut-the state his father had represented in the Senate-by about 5%.

But on the other hand, Dukakis only won Massachusetts by 8%, doing worse there than George McGovern (the only state where he did worse than McGovern), despite the facts that it was his home state, that it was a Democratic bastion except in landslide years, and that he was the incumbent Governor. And Dukakis came within single digits in New Mexico and Colorado-the latter state's result is particularly intriguing, given that Reagan won it by nearly 30% in 1984-but did worse than Mondale in Tennessee and about the same as him throughout most of the South, particularly in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. So 1988 is a demonstration, more then almost any other election, of how there is no such thing as a universal swing.

Yes - 1988 was a strange election, caught between alignments - residual New Deal voting, suburban Reaganist and law-and-order Republicanism, and hints of the alignment to come, particularly with Democratic strength in the Upper Midwest and Upper New England. Another strange result was Louisiana - Dukakis’ best Southern states, but one of Carter’s worst in 1980.

The two strangest for me were Colorado and Maine. With Colorado, I have no idea why it showed a brief Democratic revival in 1988 and 1992 after 40 years of GOP presidential dominance, not to reappear again until 2008. As for Maine, it seemed a good fit for Dukakis - like Iowa and Vermont, a very white, rural, liberal-leaning state (which was to become reliably Democratic in the following decades), where the Willie Horton issue had little impact. Did the fact that the Bush family had their summer residence there alone really give HW his surprisingly decisive victory? I feel there must be another facet of the state I am overlooking.

[Alcibiades]

• Colorado 1988: growing influence of resort-town counties and very loyal Hispanic vote was what made the state close (same true of New Mexico). Carter was a poor fit for almost every Democratic group in those states.

But why was Colorado, having voted in line with the national average, then significantly more Republican than it in 1996 and 2000? After all, it’s not as if the groups you mentioned above grew any less influential (although I guess in 2000, Bush did well with Hispanics).