Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign
2008 United States presidential campaign of Barack Obama
Barack Obama, then junior United States senator from Illinois, announced his candidacy for president of the United States on February 10, 2007, in Springfield, Illinois. After winning a majority of delegates in the Democratic primaries of 2008, on August 23, leading up to the convention, the campaign announced that Senator Joe Biden of Delaware would be the vice presidential nominee. At the 2008 Democratic National Convention on August 27, Barack Obama was formally selected as the Democratic Party nominee for president of the United States in 2008. He was the first African American in history to be nominated on a major party ticket. On November 4, 2008, Obama defeated the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, making him the president-elect and the first African American elected president.
Obama was the third sitting U.S. senator, after Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy, to be elected president. Upon the vote of the Electoral College on December 15, 2008, and the subsequent certification thereof by a Joint Session of the United States Congress on January 8, 2009, Barack Obama was elected as president and Joe Biden as vice president, with 365 of 538 electors. He also became the first president to not be born in the contiguous United States, as he was born in Hawaii.
Many pundits have considered Obama's 2008 campaign to be one of the greatest political underdog stories in U.S. history. The campaign is credited for shifting the status quo of the Democratic platform, especially on issues such as healthcare reform.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign” is 2008 United States presidential campaign of Barack Obama. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Barack, Obama and presidential, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “2008 United States presidential campaign of Barack Obama” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2935433. The first chronological checks are 2007, 2008 and 2009.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.