The Forum Volume 6 Issue 4 2008 Article 7 An Exceptional Election Performance Values and Crisis in the 2008 Presidential Election James E Campbell University at Buffalo The State University of New York jcampbel buffalo edu Copyright c 2009 The Berkeley Electronic Press All rights reserved An Exceptional Election Performance Values and Crisis in the 2008 Presidential Election James E Campbell Abstract This article examines the influences on the 2008 presidential election that led to the election of Barack Obama There were many reasons why observers expected 2008 to be a strong year for the Democrats The poor retrospective evaluations of the Bush presidency were thought to be too much of a burden for any Republican presidential candidate to bear successfully On the other hand open seat elections have been historically close in part because successor candidates receive neither the full credit nor the full blame of incumbents Moreover in a period of partisan parity and ideological polarization tight contests are to be expected Add to these factors the fact that neither party s nominee faced an easy time winning his party s nomination and the fact that McCain was unusually moderate for a Republican presidential candidate and Obama was a northern liberal as well as the first African American presidential candidate of a major party and there was every reason to suspect a closely decided election That was the way that the election was shaping up in the polls until the Wall Street meltdown hit in mid September It was the game changer that tipped the election to Obama KEYWORDS elections presidency political parties economy Wall Street meltdown polarization campaign spending open seat retrospective voting James E Campbell is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University at Buffalo SUNY He is also the President of Pi Sigma Alpha the national honor society of political science He is the author of three university press books on American elections including The American Campaign U S Presidential Campaigns and the National Vote He has also published more than sixty five articles and book chapters on various aspects of American politics Campbell An Exceptional Election 1 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 1 The latest 2008 election data are from Dave Leip s Atlas of U S Presidential Elections website at http www uselectionatlas org 2 These election data are from CQ Press 2005 Published by The Berkeley Electronic Press 2009 The Forum 2 Vol 6 2008 No 4 Article 7 Wall 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 first caucuses convened in Iowa to select delegates to the national conventions the public had grown dissatisfied or impatient