2012 United States presidential election in Washington (state)
election in Washington
The 2012 United States presidential election in Washington took place on November 6, 2012, as part of the 2012 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. Washington voters chose 12 electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote pitting incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama and his running mate, Vice President Joe Biden, against Republican challenger and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and his running mate, Congressman Paul Ryan.
President Obama easily won the state of Washington, taking 56.16% of the vote to Mitt Romney's 41.29%, a 14.87% margin of victory. In terms of raw vote total, Obama received 1,755,396 votes to Romney's 1,290,670 votes, a 464,726 vote margin. Obama received the largest number of votes of any candidate up to that point, a record which would be broken by his then-running mate Joe Biden in 2020, when Biden broke Obama's record by 614,216 votes. Third parties collectively made up 79,450 votes, or 2.54%. Obama led in every single poll conducted, often by double digits. Washington has not voted for a Republican since Ronald Reagan carried it in his 1984 landslide, and today is considered part of the Blue Wall, a bloc of 242 electoral votes that have safely voted for the Democratic nominee since 1992. Despite being a Republican-leaning swing state in the early- to mid-20th century, the rise of cultural conservatism and resistance to social liberalism in the Republican Party pushed voters in Washington, as well as many other Blue Wall states, away from the Republicans.
As of the most recent election in Washington held in 2024, this is the last time in which Cowlitz County, Grays Harbor County, Mason County, and Pacific County voted Democratic, and also the last in which Whitman County voted Republican.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “2012 United States presidential election in Washington (state)” as election in Washington. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as election in Washington. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17067714. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2020, 1984 and 1992.
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