Recent Presidential Elections

2008 Election

The Debates, Why Obama Won

Looking toward November, both McCain and Obama [had] set their sights on a fast-growing segment of the U.S. electorate: the Hispanic vote that was increasingly crucial in battleground states such as Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico as well as California and other Western states such as Arizona.

Both candidates touted their records on immigration reform, a key issue for many Hispanics, and questioned the other's commitment to it.

McCain believed he could compete for Hispanic voters, who traditionally aligned with Democrats. But he would have to overcome his own party's label, which had become toxic with many Hispanics after the anger expressed over illegal immigration in the recent GOP primaries and the continual anti-"amnesty" rhetoric from conservative talk radio.

After all the abuse that McCain took from his own party for twice pushing comprehensive immigration reform bills in the Senate, he was forced to defend his pivot from the previous year, in which he said he would support reforms such as a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants only after the border was secured.

"That's a tactical difference — that's not a change in his position," Charlie Black, a senior McCain adviser, told The Republic.

To supporters of comprehensive immigration reform, it was more than a tactical shift. The idea behind a single piece of legislation that would balance border security with a guest-worker program, a pathway to citizenship and other reforms was that it was the only way to ensure passage for all the measures. Once the borders were secured, they feared, most Republicans would abandon the benefits that the immigrant community sought.

McCain also got no points with Hispanics for largely ignoring Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's controversial neighborhood crime sweeps, which had started to make national news. Though it was not explicitly stated, it was clear Arpaio's deputies were targeting immigrants in the sweeps.

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Despite McCain's aggressive courting of the Hispanic vote, there was always a sense that it was futile given the political atmosphere (Nowicki 16-17).

“The last four weeks of this election will be about whether the American people are willing to turn our economy and national security over to Barack Obama, a man with little record, questionable judgment, and ties to radical figures like unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said (Egan 2).

The first presidential debate in Mississippi went off as planned. And it was there that McCain truly may have lost the election.

It wasn't because of McCain's performance, which was solid if a little stiff and abrasive at times. Except for some discussion of the economic crisis, the debate focused on national security and foreign policy, two issues in McCain's comfort zone. Some observers said McCain may have won the debate on points, some said Obama won outright, while still others said it was probably no worse for McCain than a draw.

The problem for McCain was that a draw was all Obama needed, so that effectively made him the winner. Given the economic anxiety and Obama's lack of seasoning, the McCain campaign's last hope was that Americans might not want to risk the presidency on someone so untested. McCain needed Obama to fumble.

Instead, Obama held his own against McCain and delivered a calm and collected performance that put to rest worries about his light experience.

"I think they pretty much did equally well in what they said," Paul Levinson, a Fordham University communications professor and expert on presidential debates, told The Republic after the event. "On the non-verbal level, Barack Obama was much better. He looked relaxed. He smiled at times. He seemed confident."

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McCain and Obama would share the stage two more times, in Nashville and Long Island, N.Y., though neither debate would move the needle.

Obama was seen as the winner of the second debate. In the third, McCain seemed most comfortable and was at his best. Still, he wasn't able to do much damage to Obama, despite bringing up Obama's ties to William Ayers, a former leader of the violent Weather Underground Organization, and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which was under fire at the time in a voter-registration controversy.

The third debate, held Oct. 15 at New York's Hofstra University, is perhaps best remembered for McCain making "Joe the Plumber" a short-lived household name.

The plumber in question, Joe Wurzelbacher, had questioned Obama on the campaign trail near Toledo, Ohio. He told Obama he wanted to buy a plumbing business that could make as much as $280,000, which would put him over Obama's $250,000 limit for tax protection and relief for small businesses. "When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," Obama told Wurzelbacher.

"Joe, I want to tell you, I'll not only help you buy that business that you worked your whole life for and I'll keep your taxes low and I'll provide available and affordable health care for you and your employees," McCain promised from the debate stage. To Obama, he said: "And what you want to do to Joe the Plumber and millions more like him is have their taxes increased and not be able to realize the American dream of owning their own business."

By the second half of October, though, it seemed as if McCain's fate was sealed. He still struggled to connect with voters on the economy, the most important issue of the day. Undecided voters seemed to break for Obama.

"I feel like we got a righteous wind at our backs here," Obama said while campaigning in Virginia.

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No matter how bleak the outlook, McCain did not give up, campaigning hard to the very last minute. The day before the election, McCain stumped in no fewer than seven states before concluding with a midnight rally at the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse in Prescott. He cast his vote in Phoenix before campaigning some more in Colorado and New Mexico (Nowicki 6-10).

Election night inspired gracious oratory by both candidates. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” Obama told a cheering crowd of supporters, “who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” Conceding defeat, McCain said, “This is a historic election, and I recognize the significance it has for African Americans and the special pride that must be theirs tonight. We both realize that we have come a long way from the injustices that once stained our nation's reputation” (Nelson 6).

Why Obama Won

Along with the unpopularity of President Bush and the dire condition of the U.S. economy, changes in the composition of the American electorate played a major role in Barack Obama’s decisive victory in the 2008 presidential election. The doubling of the nonwhite share of the electorate between 1992 and 2008 was critical to Obama’s election as African-American and other nonwhite voters provided him with a large enough margin to overcome a substantial deficit among white voters. In addition, voters under the age of 30 preferred Obama by a better than 2–1 margin, accounting for more than 80 percent of his popular vote margin. Despite the overall Democratic trend, the results revealed an increasingly polarized electorate. Over the past three decades the coalitions supporting the two major parties have become much more distinctive geographically, racially, and ideologically. The growth of the nonwhite electorate along with the increasing liberalism and Democratic identification of younger voters suggest that a successful Obama presidency could put the Democratic Party in a position to dominate American politics for many years (Abramowitz “Transformation” 1).

… 15 states accounted for almost 90% of total spending on television advertising by the Obama and McCain campaigns. These same 15 states were also heavily targeted for grassroots voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives by the campaigns. According to data compiled by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, as of early August, more than 80% of Obama field offices and more than 90% of McCain field offices were located in these states.

Thanks to Barack Obama’s enormous fundraising prowess, which allowed his campaign to turn down public financing, the Obama campaign enjoyed a substantial advantage in spending on TV advertising in the battleground states. Altogether, the Obama campaign and its allies spent about $258 million on television ads in these 15 states, compared with about $164 million by the McCain campaign and its allies, a better than three-to-two advantage.

Perhaps reflecting its greater emphasis on grassroots campaigning and ability to capitalize on the enthusiasm of its supporters, the Obama campaign had an even bigger advantage when it came to field organization in the battleground states. As of early August, according to Nate Silver, the Obama campaign had opened 281 field offices in these 15 states, compared with only 94 for the McCain campaign, almost a three-to-one advantage.

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Evidence from the 2008 presidential election suggests that both spending on television ads and field organization affected the results of the election in the 15 battleground states. On average, the Obama campaign gained a measurable electoral benefit in these states from its huge advantages in spending and field organization. That electoral benefit may well have tipped two states, Indiana and North Carolina, to Obama.

While the findings presented here suggest that advertising spending and field organization made a difference in the battleground states, they did not alter the outcome of the presidential election. Twelve of the 14 swing states that voted for Obama probably would have ended up in his column even without any advantages in advertising spending or field offices because of their normal partisan voting tendencies and the national trend toward Obama (Abramowitz “Do” 5, 7).

The outgoing President George W. Bush, McCain's rival from the 2000 GOP primaries, had left the Republican Party in rough shape.

Polls said he was wildly unpopular, making it more likely voters would seek a change in 2008. The economy was weak and about to get a lot worse. By October, a New York Times/CBS poll would find a historic 89 percent of Americans believed the United States was on the wrong track and only 7 percent believed it was headed in the right direction.

Bush's record appeared to be an all-but-impossible albatross for any nominee from his party to overcome.

Unfortunately for McCain, his fights with Bush — over the 2000 South Carolina primary, over the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, over campaign-finance reform — seemed liked ancient history. While McCain's campaign was eager to revive his "maverick" brand, it had to do so without alienating the party's pro-Bush voters. That meant he never could really reject or truly distance himself from the Bush presidency (Nowicki “John” 6).

In retrospect, McCain certainly made mistakes — some big, some not so big — that damaged his competitiveness. His response to the economic crisis clearly backfired. Many voters saw his return to the Senate as a stunt. There's still an argument about whether his gamble on Palin as a running mate helped him enough with his base to offset how much she hurt him with independents. Perhaps he should have been more aggressive in distancing himself from the politically radioactive Bush.

And for all of McCain's effort to court the Latino vote, Obama clobbered him among that demographic, too, 67 percent to 31 percent. A Latino running mate from a swing state, rather than Palin from Alaska, might have helped, though McCain could never reflect the country's changing demographics the way Obama did.

The hopes of McCain's campaign hinged largely on Obama making rookie mistakes. Not only did Obama not make such mistakes, he ran a much-emulated, highly disciplined campaign that was able to raise unprecedented amounts of money.

The bottom line, though, is that after eight years of the Bush administration, war-fatigued voters were ready to give the Democrats a shot. It was an impulse that would be all but impossible for McCain, or any GOP candidate, to reverse.

A USA TODAY/Gallup poll gauged Bush's approval rating on Election Day 2008 at just 25 percent.

"Look, he didn't run the best campaign that we've ever seen, but no Republican could have won this year," Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 election. "You can't win with conditions this bad for the incumbent party. And that's McCain's consolation: He did reasonably well under extremely difficult conditions. It was never meant to be" (Nowicki “It” 11-13).

Republican operatives (including Karl Rove) were accused of altering voting machine tallies in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election resulting in George W. Bush receiving a plurality of votes to win the state and the national election.

The statistically anomalous [recent practice of] shifting of votes to the conservative right [via voting machine manipulation] has become so pervasive in post-HAVA [Help America Vote Act 2002] America that it now has a name of its own. Experts call it the "red shift."

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Some argue that the Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 disprove the existence of the red shift. However, this may be a misinterpretation of complex political upheavals that occurred in each of those election years.

While Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives in 2006, and the White House in 2008, postelection analyses did in fact suggest extensive red-shift rigging. But in both election cycles, these efforts simply failed to overcome eleventh-hour events so negative that they drastically undercut the projected wins for the G.O.P.

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The collapse of Lehman Brothers months before the 2008 elections [overwhelmed] … John McCain's numbers. Pre-election polls showed that the American public blamed the Republicans for the imploding financial markets. "These political sea changes swamped a red shift that turned out to be under-calibrated," argues [Election Defense Alliance Director] Jonathan Simon, who speculates that Barack Obama actually won by a historic landslide, driven by an overwhelming backlash against the policies of the Bush Administration (Collier 11, 12).

Addendum

There are copious anti-Obama texts from the earliest days of his campaign. In the book I am writing on this subject, there’s a chapter on patriotism. These allegations are among the earliest texts with fauxtography “proving” that Obama wouldn’t sing the national anthem or salute the flag, had an American flag removed from the exterior of his campaign plane, wouldn’t wear a flag pin, and dissed the Boy Scouts of America. There was a rumor that he lowered the White House flag to half-staff after the death of Whitney Houston but not after the death of Nancy Reagan. There’s a chapter on the beliefs that Obama was a Muslim. Chronologically, these surface much sooner than the birther beliefs, a cluster of notions claiming that circumstances surrounding his birth made him ineligible to be president of the United States. There are the beliefs that he started the Ebola epidemic so that whites could be killed off and the United States populated with Muslims, or that he’s gay and had arranged for numerous lovers who referred to him as “Bathhouse Barry” to be killed so that they couldn’t out him. And there are almost as many rumors about Michelle Obama as there are about Barack. It has been claimed that she hired far more assistants than any prior First Lady, that her senior thesis reflected an anti-white agenda, that she wanted a picture of herself wearing a royal crown on a US postage stamp, and (drumroll, please) that she was born a man and had a sex-change operation. Since Obama left office, the rumors have continued: that he left roaches in the White House; that after he moved out, a stash of illegal drugs was discovered in his living quarters; more ominously, that he and “deep state” operatives are sabotaging the current administration. Lest you think the rumors are subsiding, there’s a photo circulating with a caption that says “President Obama gave Presidential Medal of Freedom to Harvey Weinstein,” and a doctored photo “proves” the case (Turner 422).

Works cited:

Abramowitz, Alan I., “Do Presidential Campaigns Matter? Evidence from the 2008 Election.” UVA/Center for Politics, August 2, 2012. Web. http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/do-presidential-campaigns-matter-evidence-from-the-2008-election/

Abramowitz, Adam I., “Transformation and Polarization: The 2008 Presidential Election and the New American Electorate.” Science Digest, April 16, 2010. Web. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379410000454

Collier, Victoria, “How to Rig an Election.” Harper’s Magazine, October 6, 2012. Web. https://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/how-to-rig-an-election/

Egan, Mark, “Obama Accuses McCain of Smear Campaign.” Reuters, October 4, 2008. Web. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics/obama-accuses-mccain-of-smear-campaign-idUSTRE4932E920081005

Nelson, Michael, “Barack Obama: Campaigns and Elections.” UVA Miller Center. Web. https://millercenter.org/president/obama/campaigns-and-elections

Nowicki, Dan, “'It Was Never Meant to Be' — John McCain Fails in 2nd Presidential bid.” The Republic, April 2, 2018. Web. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2018/04/02/john-mccain-loses-2008-presidential-election-barack-obama-wins-2008-election/825774001/

Nowicki, Dan, “John McCain Reaches Long-Sought Goal, Runs for President against Obama.” The Republic, April 2, 2018. Web. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2018/04/02/john-mccain-presidential-election-barack-obama/827818001/

Turner, Patricia A., “Respecting the Smears: Anti-Obama Folklore Anticipates Fake News.” Journal of American Folklore, Volume 131, Number 522, Fall 2018. Web. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/707447/pdf