1984 United States presidential election in Virginia

November 6, 1984

Nominee Ronald Reagan Walter Mondale Party Republican Democratic Home state California Minnesota Running mate George H. W. Bush Geraldine Ferraro Electoral vote 12 0 Popular vote 1,337,078 796,250 Percentage 62.29% 37.09%

County and Independent City Results Reagan   40–50%   50–60%   60–70%   70–80%   80–90% Mondale   40–50%   50–60%   60–70%

President before election Ronald Reagan Republican Elected President Ronald Reagan Republican

The 1984 United States presidential election in Virginia took place on November 6, 1984. All 50 states and the District of Columbia, were part of the 1984 United States presidential election. Virginia voters chose 12 electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president of the United States.

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.

Virginia weighed in for this election as 5 points more Republican than the national average. As of the 2020 presidential election, this is the last election in which the independent cities of Franklin, Lexington, Roanoke, and Falls Church voted for the Republican candidate, and the last election when Virginia voted to the right of Mississippi. Reagan won Virginia by a landslide 25 percentage point margin. The Old Dominion, which had been the only former Confederate state to vote for Gerald Ford in 1976, had, unlike many other Southern states, not even been particularly close in 1980: Virginia rejected the incumbent Southerner, Jimmy Carter, in favor of Reagan by nearly 13 points. 1984 confirmed Virginia's position as a center of the emerging Republican South; Reagan's 62.3 percent vote share in the state made it his seventeenth best nationally, and his fourth-best in the Old Confederacy, after Florida, Texas, and South Carolina. (Of those three, Florida and Texas had similarly decisively rejected Carter in 1980.)

Reagan performed well throughout all of Virginia's regions, relegating Mondale mostly to some largely African-American counties in the east, some highly unionized coal counties in southwest Virginia, and the independent cities of Alexandria, Norfolk, Richmond, and Portsmouth.^[1] Particularly noteworthy, however, was Reagan's strong performance in Virginia's large, suburban counties: he got over sixty percent of the vote in Fairfax County, which cast the most votes of any of the state's jurisdictions, and over seventy percent in the independent city of Virginia Beach, Henrico County, and Chesterfield County. He also got over 2/3 of the vote in the emerging exurb of Prince William County. In a noteworthy shift against the state and national trend, however, Mondale flipped Arlington County, making Reagan the first Republican since William Howard Taft in 1908 to win the White House without carrying that county.^[2]

Campaign

72% of white voters supported Reagan while 27% supported Mondale.^[3][4]

Results

See also

• Presidency of Ronald Reagan

References

Works cited

• Black, Earl; Black, Merle (1992). The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674941306.