2012 United States presidential election in Kentucky

2012 United States presidential election in Kentucky
Turnout	59.70%
Romney 50–60% 60–70% 70–80% 80–90%	Obama 40–50% 50–60%
President before election; Barack Obama; Democratic	Elected President ; Barack Obama; Democratic

The 2012 United States presidential election in Kentucky took place on November 6, 2012, as part of the 2012 General Election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. Kentucky voters chose eight 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.

Romney carried Kentucky by a landslide margin, winning 60.47% of the vote to Obama's 37.78%. This represented a margin of 22.69%, a great improvement for the Republican Party from 2008, when they won with a 16.22% margin. Although Kentucky had been won by Southern Democrat Bill Clinton twice in the 1990s, Obama was seen as a poor cultural fit for the state, and he did not compete here either time he ran. The Romney campaign also attacked Obama's administration as being hostile to the coal industry, historically an important part of the state's economy. Consequently, Obama suffered a historically poor showing in the traditionally staunchly Democratic coalfields of Eastern Kentucky, where many counties that had even voted by wide margins for landslide Democratic losers like George McGovern and Walter Mondale defected to the Republicans in 2012.

Knott County, which had given Clinton 73% of the vote in 1996 and nearly 72% to Mondale in 1984 (despite the latter losing nationally by more than 18 percentage points and only carrying one state), gave Romney 73% of the vote in 2012. Even Elliott County, the only county in the state in which Obama had broken 60% in 2008, barely held on in 2012, giving Obama a narrow plurality win, his only victory in the region, and one of just four county wins in the entire state. This marked the first time since the county's founding that the Democratic nominee won less than 60% of the vote in Elliott County, and would prove to be the conclusion of Elliott's longest-in-the-nation, 140-year Democratic voting streak. The county would flip to the GOP by a landslide margin four years later. Wolfe County, which had returned to the Democratic Party in 2004 and 2008 after casting its first-ever Republican vote for George W. Bush in 2000, went for Romney by over twenty points. As such, Obama became the first Democrat to ever win the White House without carrying Wolfe County since its founding in 1860, Menifee County since its founding in 1869, or Henderson County since the founding of the Republican Party.

The only part of the state where Obama won convincingly was Jefferson County, the most urban and populous county in the state, and home to Louisville. He also eked out a close win in Fayette County, the second-most populous county, home to Lexington. Despite losing five counties he won in 2008, he managed to flip Franklin County, home to the state capital of Frankfort, which he had narrowly lost in 2008. As of the 2020 presidential election, this is the last time that Elliott and Franklin Counties voted for a Democrat in a presidential election. Obama is the only Democrat to ever win two terms without carrying the state at least once.

Primary elections

Democratic primary

Barack Obama's only "opponent" in the primary was the "Uncommitted" ballot option, which garnered more than 42% of the primary vote, making Kentucky one of Obama's worst contested primary results.^[2]

Kentucky Democratic primary, 2012^[3]
Candidate	Votes	Percentage	Delegates
Barack Obama (incumbent)	119,293	57.85%	39
Uncommitted	86,925	42.15%	34

Republican primary

[1]

[2]

[3]