Kentucky was won by Republican nominee John McCain by a 16.22% margin of victory with 57.40% of the vote.

Their last predictions before election day were: McCain won every pre-election poll against Obama, almost all of them by a double-digit margin and with at least 49% of the vote.

[18] Since 1964, Kentucky has only gone Democratic three times--Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, both of whom were White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) from the South, whereas Obama was an African American "big-city liberal" from Chicago.

(Similar socio-cultural dynamics existed in other Southern and Appalachian states with a large ancestral Democratic base, such as Tennessee, West Virginia, and Arkansas.)

In the 2008 primary, exit polls conducted found that 30 percent of Clinton supporters opted not to vote for Obama in the general election, 40% would vote McCain and the rest would support Obama in the general election.

Obama decided to not spend campaign funds on Kentucky and instead went to more viable battleground states like North Carolina and Indiana instead.

McCain won Kentucky by a margin of 16.22 points on election day and performed slightly worse than George Bush in 2004.

Republicans also held onto an open seat vacated by Ron Lewis in Kentucky's 2nd Congressional District.