2008 Electoral Map

2008 Election Results

Barack Obama defeated John McCain, winning 365 electoral votes to 173 and nearly 53% of the popular vote to become the nation’s first Black president. After two close elections, Democrats won a clear national victory and substantially expanded their map.

Obama held every state John Kerry had carried in 2004 and added Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico. He also won one electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. Virginia and Indiana had not voted Democratic since 1964.

The breadth of those gains mattered. North Carolina and Indiana were extremely close, but Obama did not need either to win. His success in Virginia and Colorado gave Democrats new options beyond the Florida-and-Ohio battlegrounds that had dominated the previous two elections. Republican losses extended from the industrial Midwest into growing metropolitan areas of the South and West.

The financial crisis turned an already difficult election for Republicans into a referendum on the Bush years. Obama paired a message of change with an extensive fundraising and organizing operation, while McCain struggled to separate himself from an unpopular president. Democrats had assembled a wider coalition — but the next election would test how much of that expansion they could keep.