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Barack Obama Presidential Election

Category: History & Politics Key figures: Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, David Axelrod

Summary

On November 4, 2008, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona to become the 44th President of the United States. Obama received 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173, and won the popular vote with 52.9 percent (69,498,516 votes) compared to McCain’s 45.7 percent (59,948,323 votes). Obama’s victory made him the first African American elected to the presidency — a milestone that drew immediate global attention and was celebrated in cities across the United States and around the world.

Obama had secured the Democratic nomination earlier in the year after a protracted primary contest against Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, whose campaign had been widely expected to prevail. Obama selected Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, a foreign policy veteran and six-term senator, as his vice presidential running mate. McCain, the Republican nominee and a five-term Arizona senator and former prisoner of war in Vietnam, chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin — a relative unknown on the national stage — as his running partner. Palin’s selection energized the Republican base but also introduced controversies that complicated the campaign’s final weeks.

The general election was heavily shaped by the deteriorating economy. The collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15 and the cascading financial crisis that followed put economic policy at the center of the race. McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign and return to Washington to address the crisis was widely judged by voters and commentators as erratic rather than decisive. Obama’s campaign, organized around the message “Change We Can Believe In” and characterized by sophisticated grassroots fundraising and digital organizing, maintained a steadier tone. Obama flipped nine states that had voted Republican in 2004 — Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia — demonstrating an expanded electoral map that reflected both demographic shifts and dissatisfaction with the outgoing Bush administration after eight years marked by the Iraq War and the financial crisis.

Significance

Obama’s election on November 4, 2008, was a watershed moment in American political history. He was the first African American to win a major party’s presidential nomination and the first to be elected president, fulfilling — in the eyes of many observers — a symbolic culmination of the civil rights movement that had desegregated American society over the preceding half-century. Grant Park in Chicago, where Obama delivered his victory speech before a crowd of approximately 240,000, became a scene of widespread emotion and celebration. His remarks acknowledged “those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful about what we can achieve.”

The electoral coalition Obama assembled — urban, younger, multiracial, and highly educated — reshaped assumptions about which voters could be mobilized at scale. His campaign raised over $750 million, shattering prior fundraising records, much of it through small-dollar online donations. His January 20, 2009 inauguration drew the largest crowd in Washington, D.C. history, estimated at 1.8 million people on the National Mall. The election also marked the Democratic Party’s strongest presidential performance since Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election, and accompanied significant Democratic gains in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Obama’s presidency — two full terms ending in January 2017 — would be defined by, among other things, the economic recovery legislation passed in response to the 2008 crisis he inherited.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_presidential_election — Wikipedia: 2008 United States presidential election
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_2008_presidential_campaign — Wikipedia: Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign
• https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/november-4/barack-obama-elected-as-americas-first-black-president — HISTORY.com: Barack Obama elected as America’s first Black president
• https://www.obama.org/stories/history/time-machine/ — Obama Foundation: A look back at the 2008 election

Related

• Lehman Brothers Collapse — The September 2008 financial crisis that dominated the final weeks of the election campaign and shaped Obama’s economic mandate.