United States presidential election, 2016 (Friedman)

The United States presidential election of 2016 was the 58th quadrennial presidential election. Republican John Huntsman Jr. defeated Democrat Deval Patrick, then the Governor of Massechusetts.

Huntsman, won the election in a landslide, receiving the highest number of electoral votes and percentage of the popular vote ever won by a Republican presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan respectively, and became the 45th President of the United States.

Patrick, after defeating Andrew Cumo and Mark Warner for the Democratic nomination, attacked Huntsman as a. For his part, Huntsman, the former Governor of Utah and US Ambassador to the People's Republic of China, acted as a force for national unity, and won a decisive victory; in the simultaneous Congressional elections, Republicans won control of the United States Senate for the first time in 10 years, and took back Control of the House of Representatives. This election marked the beginning of what is popularly called the "Hutnsman Revolution."

Background
Through the 2000s, the United States underwent a wrenching period of low economic growth, high inflation and interest rates, and intermittent energy crises. Added to this was a sense of malaise that in both foreign and domestic affairs, certain people perceived that the nation was headed downward. During the Obama Administration this sense of doom on the domestic front had been somewhat been relaxed with the end of Great Recession, and the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the beginning of the election season, the start of the Second Cold War had sharpened public perceptions of a global crisis, rather than a domestic one.

Nomination
In the United States, there are two major political parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. There are also several minor parties, usually called third parties, who have not won a presidential election since 1848 (Lincoln's National Union Party, which won in 1864, was a short-lived coalition of Republicans and Northern Democrats rather than an independent party), although in 1912 former President Theodore Roosevelt, as candidate of the Progressive Party (nicknamed the Bull Moose Party) came in second by a wide margin, defeating the Republican candidate. Most media and public focus is on the two major parties.

Each major party hosts candidates who go through a nomination process to determine the presidential nominee for that party. The nomination process consists of primaries and caucuses, held by the 50 states, as well as Guam, Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. The winner of each of these primary elections usually receives delegates proportional to the percentage of the popular vote that candidate received in each states. In many Republican primaries, all the state's delegates are awarded to the winning candidate. In the Democratic Party, high-ranking party members known as superdelegates each receive one vote in the convention. Whichever candidate has the majority of the delegates at the end of the primary elections is designated the presumptive nominee until he or she is formally nominated and endorsed for the presidency by his or her political party. This is done by the aforementioned delegates for each party.

Candidates

 * Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York
 * Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts
 * Mark Warner, Former U.S. senator from Virginia
 * Kasim Reed, Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia
 * Hillary Clinton, Former Secretary of State

Candidates

 * Jon Huntsman Jr., Former governor of Utah and U.S. Ambassador to China
 * Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey
 * Marco Rubio, U.S. Senator from Florida
 * Kelly Ayotte, U.S. Senator from New Hampshire