2008 United States presidential election in Arkansas instance of United States presidential election in Arkansas
The 2008 United States presidential election in Arkansas took place on November 4, 2008, and was part of the 2008 United States presidential election. State voters chose six representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
Arkansas was won by Republican John McCain by a 19.9% margin of victory, an even greater margin than George W. Bush attained in 2004, despite the national Democratic trend. This was likely due to the issue of race in the presidential election. Prior to the election, all 17 news organizations considered this a state McCain would win, or otherwise a red state. The state trended dramatically Republican in 2008, as McCain performed over 4% better than Bush did in 2004 and more than doubled his margin of victory. Only five counties swung more Democratic in 2008, and the vast majority of counties swung heavily Republican, some by as much as 30%. Of the ten counties with the largest percentage swing to the Republicans in the U.S. during this election, six of them were located in Arkansas.Obama became the first Democrat to win the White House without carrying Arkansas. Since 1996, the Natural State has rapidly transformed from a Democratic stronghold into one of the most Republican states in the nation. It was also one of the six states where neither Obama nor McCain won during the primary season, and the strongest of five states that swung rightward in this election, the others being Oklahoma, Louisiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
Despite McCain's landslide victory in the state's presidential race, Democratic Senator Mark Pryor easily won re-election on the same ballot. This was the first time Arkansas did not vote for the winner of the presidential election since 1968. As of 2020, this is the last time Arkansas has voted to the left of Alabama. This was also the first time ever that Arkansas voted to the right of Nebraska.Analysis
Although former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, easily carried his home state of Arkansas in 1992 and 1996, the state was largely considered a safe state for McCain. Early polls gave McCain a 9-point lead among possible voters on Election Day.  Although the state was still strongly Democratic at the non-presidential levels, on Election Day, Arkansas voted for McCain by a margin of approximately 20%--ten points better than Bush's showing four years earlier. In this election, Arkansas voted 27.12% to the right of the nation at-large.A handful of counties — some of which had not voted for the Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon won every county in 1972 — swung safely into the GOP column. The Delta county of Jackson, for example, swung from a 14.3-point victory for Democrat Kerry in 2004 to a 16.3-point victory for McCain in 2008. A possible factor for such the large swing away from the Democrats could have been the fact that Hillary Clinton, who once served as First Lady of Arkansas while her husband was Governor, did not receive the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. The polls showed Clinton defeating McCain in Arkansas. Obama became the first Democrat in history to win the White House without carrying Arkansas.
During the same election, however, freshman Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Pryor faced no Republican opposition, and was reelected in a landslide victory over Rebekah Kennedy of the Green Party. The four members of the state's delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives (three Democrats and one Republican) were also reelected with no major-party opposition. Republicans, however, picked up three seats in the Arkansas House of Representatives and one Democratic state representative became a Green (he later returned to the Democratic Party in 2009).
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