page_title: 2008 United States presidential election
section_title: Conduct
hierarchical_section_title: 2008 United States presidential election / Conduct
caption_attribution_description: English: Cartogram of the 2008 Electoral Vote for US President, with each square representing one electoral vote. Nebraska, being one of two states that are not winner-take-all, for the first time had its votes split, with NE-2 voting for Obama and the rest of the state for McCain. The population density of the 50 states varies by three orders of magnitude (from NJ with nearly 1,200 people per square mile, to AK with roughly 1 1/4 people per sq mi). Because of that huge variation, a regular map of the US that is typically used to present electoral vote results can convey a very skewed impression of the outcome where sparsely populated states appear overrepresented and densely populated states appear underrepresented. The cartogram approach of this image eliminates that problem by presenting the area of each state in an exact one-to-one correspondence with its number of electoral votes. But this is achieved at the cost of introducing distortions to the actual shape of each state and their positioning in relation to each other.
context_page_description: The 2008 United States presidential election was the 56th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 4, 2008. The Democratic ticket of Barack Obama, the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois, and Joe Biden, the senior U.S. Senator from Delaware, defeated the Republican ticket of John McCain, the senior Senator from Arizona, and Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska. Obama became the first African American ever to be elected to the presidency as well as being only the third sitting United States Senator elected president, joining Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy.
  Incumbent Republican President George W. Bush was ineligible to pursue a third term due to the term limits established by the 22nd Amendment. McCain secured the Republican nomination by March 2008, defeating former Governors Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and other challengers. The Democratic primaries were marked by a sharp contest between Obama and the initial front-runner, Senator Hillary Clinton. Clinton's victory in the New Hampshire primary made her the first woman to win a major party's presidential primary. After a long primary season, Obama secured the Democratic nomination in June 2008.
context_section_description: Election Day was on November 4, 2008. The majority of states allowed early voting, with all states allowing some form of absentee voting. Voters cast votes for listed presidential candidates but were actually selecting representatives for their state's Electoral College slate.
  A McCain victory quickly became improbable as Obama amassed early wins in his home state of Illinois, the Northeast, and the critical battleground states of Ohio (which no Republican has ever been elected president without winning) and Pennsylvania by 9:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. Obama won the entire Northeast by comfortable margins and the Great Lakes states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota by double digits. McCain held on to traditionally Republican states like North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska (though notably, Obama did win an electoral vote from Nebraska's 2nd congressional district), Kansas, Oklahoma, Montana, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and his home state of Arizona. McCain, unlike Bush in 2000 and 2004, failed to win all the southern states: Obama won Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. Obama also won the hotly contested states of Iowa and New Mexico, which Al Gore had won in 2000 and George W. Bush in 2004. Also, for only the second time since 1936 (1964 being the other), Indiana went Democratic, giving Obama all eight Great Lakes states, the first time a presidential candidate had won all of them since Richard Nixon in 1972.
  CNN and Fox News called Virginia for Obama shortly before 11:00 PM, leaving him only 50 electoral votes shy of victory with only six West Coast states (California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Alaska, and Hawaii) still voting. All American networks called the election in favor of Obama at 11:00 PM as the polls closed on the West Coast. Obama was immediately declared the winner in California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii, McCain won Idaho, and the Electoral College totals were updated to 297 for Obama and 146 for McCain (270 are needed to win). McCain gave a concession speech half an hour later in his hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. Obama appeared just before midnight Eastern Time in Grant Park, Chicago, in front of a crowd of 250,000 people to deliver his victory speech.
  Following Obama's speech, spontaneous street parties broke out in cities across the United States including Philadelphia, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta, Madison, and New York City and around the world in London; Bonn; Berlin; Obama, Japan; Toronto; Rio de Janeiro; Sydney; and Nairobi.
  Later on election night, after Obama was named the winner, he picked up several more wins in swing states in which the polls had shown a close race. These included Florida, Indiana, Virginia, and the western states of Colorado and Nevada. All of these states had been carried by Bush in 2004. North Carolina and the bellwether state of Missouri remained undecided for several days. Eventually Obama was declared the winner in North Carolina and McCain in Missouri, with Obama pulling out a rare win in Nebraska's 2nd congressional district. This put the projected electoral vote count at 365 for Obama and 173 for McCain. Obama's victories in the populous swing states of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia contributed to his decisive win. The presidential electors cast their ballots for president and Vice President, and Congress tallied these votes on January 8, 2009.
caption: Cartogram of the Electoral Votes for 2008 United States presidential election, each square representing one electoral vote. The map shows the impact of winning swing states. Nebraska, being one of two states that are not winner-take-all, for the first time had its votes split, with its second congressional district voting for Obama.
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