Why Obama Won 2008 Election

Nikko Siragusa Pol 1101, Prof.DiGaetano   2008 Presidential Election   “Victory has a thousand fathers”, John F. Kennedy once said and in the 2008 presidential election between Democrat, Barack Obama and Republican, John McCain there may have been a thousand or more reasons why Barack Obama won the presidency. Many elements to why Obama won this election have to do with his and McCain’s electoral coalition between the race, ethnicity, age, gender, geography, population, education, income, religion, and amount of people who voted. Due to Obama’s overwhelming victory in the presidency campaign and the Democrat’s control over the House of Representatives and the Senate, I would say that this election constitutes as a realigning election as the power has drastically shifted from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party.   There were many factors that contributed to Obama’s win of the highest ranked power in our government. Race and ethnicity played a large role in gaining Obama votes. Minorities, such as Asians and Hispanics, gave more than half their votes to Obama. Also, Blacks gave an astronomically large amount of their votes to Obama, ninety-five percent to be precise, only four percent of Blacks voted for McCain. The youth of our nation, registered voters age 29-18, gave their largest percent of votes, since at least 1972, to the Democratic Party. More than three fourths of this group of people voted for Obama over McCain. Obama also won more votes from voters ages 30-44, had an equal amount of votes as McCain from voters ages 45-59, and had only two percent less votes than McCain from voters 60 years of age and older. White men and women both gave more votes to McCain while almost all Black men and women gave their votes to Obama. Obama won a higher percentage of votes from anyone who had any form of education; he had a significantly higher percentage of votes from voters who did not graduate high school opposed to a close difference in votes between Obama and... [continues]

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