Although Obama almost always led in polls, some argued that McCain, a nationally prominent senator from neighboring Arizona, had a legitimate chance of pulling off an upset in Nevada.

[15] On election day, Obama won the state with 55% and by a double-digit margin of victory, a much better performance than polls showed.

In 2008, McCain of neighboring Arizona was leading most polls taken March until the end of September (around the time of the 2008 financial crisis), when Obama of Illinois started taking the lead in almost every poll conducted from the beginning of October on, some in double digits.

[19] The subprime mortgage crisis hit Nevada hard, and McCain's statement that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" apparently hurt him in a state devastated by the economic meltdown.

His victory rested almost entirely on winning the state's three largest jurisdictions: Clark County, home to Las Vegas; Washoe County, which contains Reno; and the independent city of Carson City,[20] which combine for 88% of Nevada's total population.

According to exit polling, they composed 15% of voters in Nevada and broke for Obama by a three-to-one margin.

McCain ran up huge margins in most of the more rural counties, which have been solidly Republican ever since Richard Nixon's 1968 win.

Indeed, Obama's 122,000-vote margin in Clark County would have been enough by itself to carry the state, and Nevada voted more Democratic than the nation as a whole for the first time since 1960 and second since 1944.

[23] At the same time, Democrats picked up a U.S. House seat in Nevada's 3rd Congressional District, which is based in Clark County and consists of most of the Las Vegas suburbs.

Democratic State Senator Dina Titus defeated incumbent Republican Jon Porter by 5.14 points with several third parties receiving a small but significant proportion of the total statewide vote.