Eisenhower ran with incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon of California, while Stevenson's running mate was Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

As Eisenhower won a decisive re-election victory nationwide, Massachusetts weighed in for this election as about 4% more Republican than the national average.

This remains the last presidential election in which Massachusetts voted more Republican than the nation,[3] as the state would trend dramatically toward the Democratic Party beginning in 1960.

Once a typical Yankee Republican bastion in the wake of the Civil War, Massachusetts had been a Democratic-leaning state since 1928, when a coalition of Irish Catholic and other ethnic immigrant voters primarily based in urban areas turned Massachusetts and neighboring Rhode Island into New England's only reliably Democratic states.

To date, this is the last time that the cities of Everett, Holyoke, Lynn, Malden, Medford, New Bedford, Newton, North Adams, Northampton, Pittsfield, Randolph, Salem, Somerville, Springfield, Winthrop, and Worcester and the towns of Adams, Arlington, Brookline, Montague, Provincetown, Sharon, Somerset, Sunderland, and Watertown voted Republican.