1996 United States presidential election in Massachusetts
election in Massachusetts
The 1996 United States presidential election in Massachusetts took place on November 5, 1996, as part of the 1996 United States presidential election. Voters chose 12 representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
A solidly blue state, Massachusetts was won by incumbent Democratic President Bill Clinton in a landslide. Clinton took 61.47% of the popular vote over Republican challenger Bob Dole, who took 28.09%, a victory margin of 33.39%. Reform Party candidate Ross Perot finished in third, with 8.89% of the popular vote.
Like New England as a whole, Massachusetts is a largely secular and liberal society in the modern era, and thus it rejected an increasingly conservative Republican Party dominated by Evangelical Christians.
Massachusetts had been a Democratic-leaning state since 1928, when voted for Democrat Catholic candidate Al Smith, and a Democratic stronghold since 1960. In fact, Clinton's landslide victory was indicative of a long-term trend in Massachusetts back toward being the overwhelmingly Democratic stronghold it had been in the 1960s, after having trended somewhat toward the GOP in 1976 and the 1980s. Clinton's 61.47% was the highest percentage a presidential candidate had received in Massachusetts since 1968, and his 33.39% victory margin was the widest margin by which any candidate won the state since the massive Democratic landslide of 1964, a record that would not be broken again until 2020.
Massachusetts was the only state in the union where Clinton broke 60% of the vote in 1996, with only the District of Columbia voting more Democratic.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1996 United States presidential election in Massachusetts” as election in Massachusetts. 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 Massachusetts. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7892841. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1996, 1928, 1960 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “1996 United States presidential election in Massachusetts” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.