2008 United States presidential election
56th quadrennial U.S. presidential election
Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 4, 2008. The Democratic ticket of Illinois junior senator Barack Obama and Delaware senior senator Joe Biden, defeated the Republican ticket of Arizona senior senator John McCain and Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Obama became the first African American to be elected to the presidency.
Incumbent Republican president George W. Bush was ineligible to run for a third term due to the term limits established by the Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution; this was the first election since 1952 in which neither the incumbent president nor vice president was on the ballot, and the first since 1928 in which neither ran for the nomination. McCain secured the Republican nomination by March 2008, defeating his main challengers Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, and selected Palin as his running mate. The Democratic primaries were marked by a sharp contest between Obama and the initial front-runner, former first lady and Senator Hillary Clinton, as well as other challengers who dropped out before most of the primaries were held, including Senators John Edwards and Joe Biden. Clinton's victory in the New Hampshire primary made her the first woman to win a major party's presidential primary. After a long primary season, Obama narrowly secured the Democratic nomination in June 2008 and selected Biden as his running mate.
During his second term in office, Bush's popularity declined significantly, which was attributed to the growing disdain for the Iraq War, his response to Hurricane Katrina, the Abu Ghraib torture controversy, and the 2008 financial crisis. McCain opted to distance himself from Bush and did not campaign with him, nor did Bush appear in person at the 2008 Republican National Convention, although he did endorse McCain.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “2008 United States presidential election” as 56th quadrennial U.S. presidential election. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as 56th quadrennial U.S. presidential election. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q45578. The Library of Congress control number is sh2010105921. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008, 1952 and 1928.
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This entry incorporates text from “2008 United States presidential election” 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.