With white Americans making up 99.04% of its population, Elliott County was the second-whitest in the country to vote for Democrat Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, the whitest being Mitchell County, Iowa. Obama garnered 61.0% of the vote, while Republican John McCain received 35.9%. In fact, Elliott County provided Obama with the highest percentage of the vote in all of Kentucky. This made it the most Democratic county in the state for the second 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 such victory in the staunchly conservative region of rural Eastern Kentucky. However, he eked out only a narrow 49.4% plurality over Mitt Romney's 46.9%, thus ending an over century-long streak of Democratic landslides in Elliott County. Reflecting the increasing rural–urban divide of modern American politics, Obama's strongest county in the state was instead Jefferson County, home to Louisville—the most populous city in Kentucky—which he won by a comfortable 54.7–43.6% margin.