ABSTRACT
Senator Barack Obama’s win in November 2008 was extraordinarily unlikely by U.S. historical standards. He was the first African American to have a serious chance of winning the general election, and he and his team in fact pulled it off on the first try. The mainstream news media often heralded it as such, as in this MSNBC report: “Barack Obama, a 47-year-old first-term senator from Illinois, shattered more than 200 years of history Tuesday night by winning election as the first African American president of the United States.”
