The 2016 West Virginia Democratic presidential primary was held on May 10 in the U.S. state of

West Virginia West Virginia is a mountainous U.S. state, state in the Southern United States, Southern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States.The United States Census Bureau, Census Bureau and the Association of American ...

as one of the Democratic Party's primaries ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The Republican Party held primaries in two states, including their own West Virginia primary, while for the Democratic Party this was the only primary on that day. In a heavily

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state where voters were angry about the Obama administration's policies, Bernie Sanders easily outpolled Clinton. Thirty percent of Democratic primary voters came from a

coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other Chemical element, elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal i ...

household, and Sanders won 63 percent of these.

Opinion polling

Results

County results

Analysis

Although West Virginia had breathed new life into Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign eight years earlier, it failed to deliver for Clinton's front-running campaign in 2016. Clinton lost every county in the state to Bernie Sanders. Sanders's West Virginia victory came from strong support among workers in the coal industry; fifty-five percent of West Virginia's Democratic voters with coal workers in their households voted for Sanders, while only 29 percent voted for Clinton. His easy win was likely fueled by Clinton's comments in March about coal, "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." Analysts speculated Sanders's win in West Virginia came not from support for his own coal policies, but from a rejection of the Obama administration's. Sanders was also helped by large numbers of Republican cross-over voters. Thirty-nine percent of Sanders voters stated they planned to vote for Donald Trump over Sanders in the November general election.

References

{{2016 Democratic primaries

Democratic primary

2016 2016 was designated as: * International Year of Pulses by the sixty-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly. * International Year of Global Understanding (IYGU) by the International Council for Science (ICSU), the Internationa ...

May 2016 in the United States