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All 538 electoral votes of the Electoral College 270 electoral votes needed to win | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Turnout | 58.2%[1] ![]() | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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![]() Presidential election results map. Blue denotes those won by Obama/Biden, red denotes states won by McCain/Palin. Numbers indicate electoral votes allotted to the winner of each state. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The 2008 United States presidential election happened on November 4, 2008. Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate and junior U.S. Senator from Illinois, won the election. He defeated John McCain, the Republican candidate, who was the senior U.S. Senator from Arizona. Obama's victory in this election made him the first African-American president.
Incumbent Republican President George W. Bush was not eligible to serve a third term by law. McCain secured the Republican nomination by March 2008, defeating former governors Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and other challengers. Obama secured the Democratic nomination in June 2008, after facing strong competition against former First Lady and Senator from New York Hillary Clinton. Clinton's victory in the New Hampshire primary made her the first woman to win a major party's presidential primary.
Obama won a decisive victory over McCain. He won states that had not voted for the Democratic presidential candidate since 1964 (Indiana and Virginia) and 1976 (North Carolina). Obama won nine states that had voted Republican in 2004: Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia, as well as Nebraska's 2nd congressional district. He received the largest share of the popular vote won by a Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and was the first Democrat to win an outright majority of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Obama won 69.5 million votes, the most ever won by a presidential candidate; this total would be surpassed in 2020 by both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
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