Elliott County was the second-whitest county in the country, at 99.04%, to vote for Democrat Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential election, the whitest being Mitchell County, Iowa. Obama garnered 61% of the vote, while Republican John McCain received 36%. In 2008, Elliott County provided Obama with the highest winning percentage of the vote out of all Kentucky counties. This made it the most Democratic county in the state for the 2nd election in a row, since it had also been Democrat John Kerry's strongest county in Kentucky in 2004. Obama would again win the county in 2012, his only county victory in traditionally staunchly conservative rural Eastern Kentucky. However he would only eke out a narrow 49% plurality over Mitt Romney's 47%, a lead of just 60 votes, thus nearly ending a long streak of Democratic landslides in Elliott County. Reflecting the increased rural-urban divide in modern American politics, Obama's strongest county in the state was instead Jefferson County, home to the state's largest city, Louisville, which he won by a much more comfortable 54.69%-43.60% margin.