Five hundred days, $1 billion, a blizzard of mostly negative campaign ads, three presidential and one vice presidential debates, much opinion poll zigzagging, millions of volunteers, rivers of sweat and tens of thousands of kilometers travelled later, US President Barack Obama won a second term in office this morning by a wider margin than projected. He defeated the Republican candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a man who first ran for the same office in 2008 but lost the Republican primary to Senator John McCain. McCain himself went on to lose the election proper to Obama.
In the quirky race for Electoral College votes, Ohio was billed to be the most crucial of battleground states and it lived up to that billing. When CNN projected an Obama win of the state, he exceeded the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the election.
However, the biggest upsetthis morning was set to occur in the rich and very diverse southern state of Florida. Most opinion polls had projected a Romney win, but he was going down to defeat in the state when the election was called in Obama's favour.
Obama's re-election victory was remarkable considering that the American economy has made only a very slow recovery from the deep recession into which it fell at the close of the Bush years in 2008. Although Obama was not blamed for the recession, he took a lot of Republican flak for failing to bring it out of the recession much faster. It also affected his job approval rating, which was below 50% for most of the campaign. US presidents usually have trouble winning re-election if their job approval rating stands below 50%.
What won the election for Obama? Pundits said it was a mixture of demographic calculation, efficient operations and a ruthless "ground game" to get their supporters out to the polls. This was a very different strategy from 2008, when Obama won by a landslide on a well received message of hope.
Among the important demographic groups that Obama won include very young people, ideological liberals, trade unionists, African Americans, Latinos, women, other minorities, people earning less than $50,000 a year and gays. Romney had an edge among Whites as well as among men generally, elders, social conservatives, evangelical Christians and the very rich. He also won among poor Whites. American Roman Catholics and Jews, once very reliable Democratic constituents, are now more evenly spread.
Each candidate won most of the states reliably aligned to his party. Obama won all the states of the Eastern seaboard and the heavily black District of Columbia. He also won almost all the industrial states of the Great Lakes region including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin. A big factor in his win of the region was the auto industry bail out that his administration did back in 2009, which prevented the auto firms General Motors, Ford and Chrysler from going bankrupt.
Obama also won the Western states of California, Oregon, Washington and Nevada as was set this morning to win Virginia and Florida. Infact, he lost only one state that he won in 2008, namely Nebraska. He won in the island state of Hawaii, where he was born.
Romney however swept a large swath of southern, central and south western states, all of them reliably red states. There were almost no surprises; he won only one state more than was won by John McCain four years ago.
What will the two great antagonists be doing this morning? Obama will most certainly be sitting with his close aides to begin planning for his second term. As for Governor Mitt Romney, he will probably do what John McCain said he did when he lost to Obama in 2008. That is, go for a sound sleep.
Daily Trust
too bad it didn't happen
romney tried too