Leading up to the 2008 election, a cautious optimism held on the Democratic side that the party could win a third consecutive term in the White House for the first time since the election of Hubert Humphrey forty years earlier. Vice President Hunt, who would be 71 when the next president was inaugurated, declined to run, leaving the race wide open. The top tier of candidates included Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, former Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo. Wellstone, the darling of the liberal activist wing, was handicapped by both his "unpresidential" appearance and his poor health, having been privately diagnosed with multiple sclerosis six years ago. Gore quickly vacuumed up soft Wellstone supporters as a result of his public fight for the president's environmental legislation. With Wellstone withdrawing in late January, Gore, despite being very close to both Cuomo and Manchin on most issues outside of the environment, emerged as the strongest candidate. He wrapped up the nomination by March and selected Massachusetts Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy and member of the Kennedy clan, as his running mate.
The Republican side was similarly divided. The presumptive front runner, 2004 vice presidential nominee Larry Pressler, declined to run and thus the gates were opened for a bevy of candidates, including Arizona Senator John McCain, Alabama Governor Robert Riley, Maryland Senator Michael Steele, New York Congressman Bill Paxon, Ohio Senator Mike DeWine and Texas Congresswoman Kay Bailey. Steele, a black freshman senator with less than five years' experience in top-tier politics, was quickly dismissed and dropped out, although he did make history as the first serious black presidential candidate for the Republicans. Paxon and DeWine split the northern moderate vote, leading to their eventual fall into the second tier and Bailey's bid was handicapped by questions of sweet-heart real estate deals some of her friends had received, leading to her withdrawal in late January. The race then became between McCain and Riley and became an almost surreal display: McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, and long-time senator ran as an iconoclastic reformer while Riley, son of a rancher who fought to reform his state's regressive tax system as governor, ran as the candidate of establishment Republicans. While McCain polled higher with independents, the party faithful by and large went with Riley, making the Alabama governor the party's nominee. Riley, the first Republican nominee from the Deep South in the party's history, chose Delaware Congressman and former governor Mike Castle as his running mate, an unorthodox choice that confounded the media covering the race.
After the primaries were over, Gore's campaign strategy, namely moving away from the president, proved to be a poor one. Gephardt still had moderately high approval ratings with most Americans but not demanding Vice President Brown's resignation and minor scandals that came to light during his second term fueled perceptions inside Washington that the president was viewed as corrupt. This was doubly not helped by Gore selecting Kennedy; while the congressman was an accomplished legislator and had a famous family name, the press latched on to Kennedy's previous support of the the Irish Republican Army during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, something antithetical to the views and laws of both the US government and that of its close ally, Great Britain, which labeled the Provisional IRA as a terrorist group.
The Riley campaign, while hitting Gore hard on his support for environmental legislation that he claimed would cost jobs in oil and coal-producing states, also pushed his proposal for tax breaks for both low-income earners and businesses while increasing the tax rates on high-income individuals. The unusual sight of a Republican presidential nominee publicly committing himself to raising taxes on the rich turned heads and gave Riley a huge media and popularity boost.
Gore never recovered from the miscues and Riley won the election by a safe margin. He became the first president from the Deep South since Zachary Taylor in 1848 and the first Alabaman elected to the presidency. The Republicans, although picking up Gore's Senate seat (which he declined to run for again to focus entirely on the presidential race), failed to win control of the Senate, evening losing a few Senate races due to having vulnerable incumbents in Democratic-trending states. The House, on the other hand, increased its Republican majority.
