Turnout: 60.10%
About this election
The 2016 United States presidential election, held on 8 November 2016, was won by the Republican nominee Donald Trump, a New York businessman and television personality who had never previously held public office, over the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state, senator and first lady. Trump won the Electoral College by 304 votes to 227, despite losing the national popular vote: Clinton received 65,853,514 votes (48.18%) to Trump's 62,984,828 (46.09%), a margin of nearly 2.9 million votes. It was the fifth time in American history, and the second in sixteen years, that a candidate won the presidency while losing the popular vote, and the result ranks among the greatest upsets in modern American politics.
Americans do not elect their president directly. Each state is allotted electors equal to its number of senators (two) plus representatives, for 538 in total, and a candidate needs 270 to win. Every state except Maine and Nebraska awards all of its electors to the statewide winner, so the contest is effectively decided in a handful of competitive "swing" states. In 2016 Maine split its votes for the first time, with Trump taking one elector from its second congressional district while Clinton carried the state overall.
Trump captured the Republican nomination against a crowded field of seventeen candidates, running an insurgent, anti-establishment campaign built on hard-line immigration policy, economic nationalism, opposition to trade deals and the slogan "Make America Great Again." Clinton, who had narrowly lost the 2008 Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, defeated a strong primary challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders to become the first woman nominated for president by a major American party. The Libertarian Gary Johnson (4,489,341 votes, 3.28%) and the Green Party's Jill Stein (1,457,218, 1.07%) drew an unusually large third-party vote, and the independent conservative Evan McMullin (731,991, 0.54%) ran strongly in Utah.
The campaign was among the most rancorous in living memory. Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state dogged her throughout, and FBI Director James Comey's announcement eleven days before the vote that he was reviewing newly discovered emails was widely seen as damaging her late momentum. Trump weathered a series of controversies, including the release of a 2005 recording in which he made lewd remarks about women. Russian interference, including the hacking and release of Democratic emails, became a central theme of the post-election period and of subsequent investigations.
Trump won 30 states to Clinton's 20 plus the District of Columbia. The decisive break came in the industrial "Blue Wall" of the upper Midwest: Trump narrowly carried Michigan (by just 0.23 points), Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — states no Republican had won since the 1980s — along with the perennial battleground of Florida. Clinton ran up enormous margins in California, New York and other large coastal states, which inflated her national popular-vote total but won her no extra electoral votes. The state-by-state map on this page shows the stark regional pattern: a Republican interior and South against a Democratic coastal and urban core.
The gap between the popular vote and the Electoral College result reignited a long-running debate about the institution. Clinton's near-three-million-vote lead, the largest ever for a losing candidate, came overwhelmingly from a small number of populous Democratic states, while Trump's efficiency in the closely divided battlegrounds delivered him the presidency. Defenders argued the system protects the role of smaller and less urban states; critics called for its abolition in favour of a national popular vote.
Trump's victory, combined with Republican majorities retained in both the House and the Senate, gave the party unified control of the federal government. His win realigned American politics around questions of immigration, trade and cultural identity, accelerated the shift of working-class white voters toward the Republicans and of college-educated suburbanites toward the Democrats, and set the stage for a turbulent single term that culminated in his defeat in 2020 and remarkable comeback in 2024.
Federal Election Commission (FEC), official 2016 presidential general-election results — fec.gov.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.