Obama won 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173 and about 53 percent of the popular vote, carrying states such as Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia that had long voted Republican. Voter turnout was the highest in four decades. The election came amid a financial crisis that had deepened that autumn. In Chicago's Grant Park, before a crowd of more than 200,000, Obama told supporters that "change has come to America". McCain conceded graciously in Phoenix.
Obama, a first-term senator and former community organizer, had defeated Hillary Clinton in a long primary contest. His campaign used the internet to raise record sums from millions of small donors and organized volunteers across the country. McCain, a Vietnam War veteran and prisoner of war, chose the little-known Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.
In September the collapse of Lehman Brothers turned the financial crisis into a panic, and polls moved decisively toward Obama. On election night the networks called the race at 11 p.m. Eastern time, when polls closed on the West Coast. In Phoenix, McCain told supporters that Americans should be proud of "the election of an African American to the presidency" and pledged his help.
In Grant Park, Obama spoke of a 106-year-old voter in Atlanta, Ann Nixon Cooper, born a generation after slavery, who had seen "the heartache and the hope" of the century. Crowds celebrated in cities across the country and around the world, and in Kenya, his father's homeland, a public holiday was declared. Obama was inaugurated on January 20, 2009.
Key people: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John McCain, Sarah Palin