President Obama easily won the state of Washington, taking 55.80% of the vote to Mitt Romney's 41.03%, a 14.77% margin of victory.[2] In terms of raw vote total, Obama received 1,755,396 votes to Romney's 1,290,670 votes, a 464,726 vote margin. Obama received the largest number of votes of any candidate up to that point, a record which would be broken by his then-running mate Joe Biden in 2020, when Biden broke Obama's record by 614,216 votes.[3] Third parties collectively made up 79,450 votes, or 2.54%. Obama led in every single poll conducted, often by double digits. Washington has not voted for a Republican since Ronald Reagan carried it in his 1984 landslide, and today is considered part of the Blue Wall, a bloc of 242 electoral votes that have safely voted for the Democratic nominee since 1992. Despite being a Republican-leaning swing state in the early- to mid-20th century, the rise of cultural conservatism and resistance to social liberalism in the Republican Party pushed voters in Washington, as well as many other Blue Wall states, away from the Republicans.[4]
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