United States presidential election in West Virginia, 1984

The 1984 United States presidential election in West Virginia took place on November 6, 1984. All 50 states and the District of Columbia, were part of the 1984 United States presidential election. West Virginia voters chose 6 electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president of the United States. West Virginia was won by incumbent United States President Ronald Reagan of California, who was running against former Vice President Walter Mondale of Minnesota. Reagan ran for a second time with incumbent Vice President and former C.I.A. Director George H. W. Bush of Texas, and Mondale ran with Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York, the first major female candidate for the vice presidency.

The presidential election of 1984 was a very partisan election for West Virginia, with over 99% of the electorate voting for either the Democratic or Republican parties, and only five parties appearing on the ballot. Most counties turned out for Reagan except for a bloc of heavily unionized, coal-dependent counties in the southern part of the state bordering Virginia and Kentucky.

Reagan won the election in West Virginia by a decisive 10.6 percentage point margin. While a comfortable victory, this made West Virginia 7.6 percentage points more Democratic than the nation at large, as well as Walter Mondale's ninth-best state. Mondale's greatest strength came from heavily unionized southern West Virginia, where he broke 60% in McDowell, Logan, Mingo, Boone, and Fayette Counties; he also carried a number of counties in central West Virginia and two in the Northern Panhandle. Reagan comfortably carried Kanawha County, the state's biggest county and one that was less typically Democratic at the time than some others in the state (having voted to re-elect Carter by only 0.3 percent), and also carried the state's other then-typically Democratic population centers, Harrison County ( Clarksburg), Raleigh County ( Beckley), and Monongalia County ( Morgantown), by margins ranging from narrow to substantial. He won the swing population center of Cabell County ( Huntington) by about the same as his national margin, and got over 2/3 of the vote in the state's largest typically Republican county, Wood County (Parkersburg).

Reagan's best county was the Unionist and ancestrally Republican Grant County, where no Democrat has ever reached forty percent and which gave Reagan over eighty percent of its ballots. His strongest performances, in general, were in the northeast of the state, where, along with strong support from Grant and likewise unionist and ancestrally Republican Morgan County, he also did well in Hampshire and Hardy Counties, which had begun to transition from typically Democratic to typically Republican in 1968; and along the middle portion of West Virginia's river border with Ohio. Both were typically Republican-leaning regions within what was otherwise an overall Democratic state at the time. Republicans would not win the state again until 2000.
West Virginia is one of five states alongside Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland and Rhode Island that Ronald Reagan lost in 1980 that Ronald Reagan won in 1984.

Results

Results by county

See also

* Presidency of Ronald Reagan

References

{{United States elections, 1984

West Virginia
1984
1984 West Virginia elections