Webb County is overwhelmingly Democratic and has voted for that party's electors since 1916 (the last Republican being incumbent President William Howard Taft in 1912). Although Texas as a whole voted for Republican nominee John McCain in the 2008 presidential election, Democrat Barack Obama won 33,435 votes (71%) of the ballots in Webb County. McCain was a distant second in Webb County with 13,111 votes (28%). Obama fared better than Democrat John Kerry had done in 2004. Latinos in Texas gave Obama 63% of their ballots, whereas Kerry had polled 50% among that group in Texas. In Webb County, Kerry received 23,654 (57%) to George W. Bush's 17,753 (42%). Nearly 57,000 registered voters in Webb County did not cast ballots in the 2008 presidential election. In 2012, despite the continuing statewide Republican trend, Webb County rebuffed Mitt Romney and cast an even larger percentage of its vote for President Obama than it had done in 2008. In 2016 Hillary Clinton actually got more votes than Obama had done 4 years earlier, but in percentage terms she lost a little ground to third parties.