Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama won a landslide victory in the U.S. presidential election Tuesday. His Republican rival John McCain conceded defeat minutes later.

Short of a final result, projections showed that Obama had collected as many as 297 electoral votes after sweeping traditional blue states in the west, including California (55), Washington (11) and Oregon (7), as well as the Pacific state of Hawaii (4).

Obama, whose father is a black Kenyan and mother a white American, becomes the first African-American president in U.S. history.

His rival, Republican John McCain, 72, got 145 electoral votes, according to TV projections.

A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the White House.

Obama, a 47-year-old first term senator from Illinois, became a clear winner even in the early hours of the much-publicized Election Night when U.S. media were joking for eyeballs to project polling results and declared McCain's defeat in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Obama will be inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009 in Washington D.C.

(Xinhua News Agency November 5, 2008)