The ForumVolume 6, Issue 4 2008 Article 7An Exceptional Election: Performance,Values, and Crisis in the 2008 PresidentialElectionJames E. Campbell∗∗University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, [email protected]2009 The Berkeley Electronic Press. All rights reserved.An Exceptional Election: Performance,Values, and Crisis in the 2008 PresidentialElection∗James E. CampbellAbstractThis article examines the influences on the 2008 presidential election that led to the electionof Barack Obama. There were many reasons why observers expected 2008 to be a strong yearfor the Democrats. The poor retrospective evaluations of the Bush presidency were thought tobe too much of a burden for any Republican presidential candidate to bear successfully. On theother hand, open seat elections have been historically close, in part because successor candidatesreceive neither the full credit nor the full blame of incumbents. Moreover, in a period of partisanparity and ideological polarization, tight contests are to be expected. Add to these factors thefact that neither party’s nominee faced an easy time winning his party’s nomination and the factthat McCain was unusually moderate for a Republican presidential candidate and Obama was anorthern liberal as well as the first African-American presidential candidate of a major party andthere was every reason to suspect a closely decided election. That was the way that the electionwas shaping up in the polls until the Wall Street meltdown hit in mid-September. It was the “gamechanger” that tipped the election to Obama.KEYWORDS: elections, presidency, political parties, economy, Wall Street meltdown, polariza-tion, campaign spending, open-seat, retrospective voting∗James E. Campbell is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the Univer-sity at Buffalo, SUNY. He is also the President of Pi Sigma Alpha, the national honor society ofpolitical science. He is the author of three university press books on American elections includ-ing The American Campaign: U.S. Presidential Campaigns and the National Vote. He has alsopublished more than sixty-five articles and book chapters on various aspects of American politics.The 2008 presidential election seemed to have it all. After several years of campaigning for the parties’ nominations and then for the general election, about 131 million American voters elected Democrat Barack Obama over Republican John McCain. The unofficial vote tally at this writing in mid-December indicates that 53.7 percent of the two-party vote was cast for Obama and 46.3 percent for McCain.1 With 365 electoral votes awarded to Obama from 28 states and the District of Columbia (plus one electoral vote from Nebraska) and 173 electoral votes awarded to McCain from 22 states, Senator Barack Obama was elected to serve as the 44th president of the United States and the first African American to occupy the office. Based on the current vote count, the margin of Obama’s popular vote victory ranks seventeenth among the thirty-six presidential elections since the Civil War. Sixteen margins were smaller and nineteen larger.2 Compared to recent elections, it is larger than either of President George W. Bush’s victories and slightly smaller than President Bill Clinton’s 1996 election. It is about the same magnitude as President Clinton’s 1992 and President George H.W. Bush’s 1988 popular vote margins. In short, the size of the 2008 winning vote margin is solid but unremarkable, neither especially close nor particularly large when set in historical perspective. However, the way in which the electorate arrived at its verdict is highly unusual. How did the electorate arrive at its decision? Early readings of the fundamentals were extremely positive for the Democrats. An unpopular president conducting an unpopular war and presiding over a sluggish economy amounted to heavy baggage for the Republicans. On closer inspection, though, the weight of this baggage might have been overstated. Several aspects of “the fundamentals” suggested that we would be in store for a close election. Partisan parity, ideological polarization, an open seat election, and nominating problems in both parties set the stage for another tight race–not unlike the two preceding elections. Polls leading up to the parties’ conventions were consistent with that view. There were even reasons why the electorate might tip toward Senator McCain. He had an unusually centrist record for a Republican presidential candidate and was running against a northern-liberal Democrat, who happened also to be the first major-party presidential candidate who was black. The polls coming out of the parties’ conventions supported the view of a close election tilted toward McCain. In the end, and what was most exceptional about this election, was that it turned on the public’s reaction to the financial credit crisis that struck the national economy in mid-September. What became known as the 1The latest 2008 election data are from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections website at http://www.uselectionatlas.org/. 2These election data are from CQ Press (2005). 1Campbell: An Exceptional ElectionPublished by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2009Wall Street meltdown was the “game changer,” the October Surprise that struck in September and turned the election decisively to Obama. A Democratic Year Before the protracted nominating struggle between Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama was settled and even before the unusual Republican nominating contest drifted to Senator John McCain, the conventional wisdom was that 2008 would be a banner year for Democrats. There was widespread unhappiness with the direction of the country during President George W. Bush’s second term. Between April and July of 2008 in four Gallup polls, a mere 15 percent of respondents on average said that they were satisfied “with the way things are going in the United States at this time.”3 The verdict about the performance of the Republican administration could hardly have been clearer or more negative. In late July, Alan Abramowitz, Thomas Mann, and Larry Sabato (2008) summarized this outlook: “It is no exaggeration to say that the political environment this year is one of the worst for a party in the White House in the past sixty years.” The fundamentals were decidedly unfavorable to the Republicans. Long before the