(photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times)
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Hussein Obama was re-elected president of the United States on Tuesday,
overcoming powerful economic headwinds, a lock-step resistance to his
agenda by Republicans in Congress and an unprecedented torrent of
advertising as a divided nation voted to give him more time.
In defeating Mitt Romney, the president carried
Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin, a near
sweep of the battleground states, and was holding a narrow advantage in
Florida. The path to victory for Mr. Romney narrowed as the night wore
along, with Mr. Obama winning at least 303 electoral votes.
A cheer of jubilation sounded at the Obama campaign
headquarters in Chicago when the television networks began projecting
him as the winner at 11:20 p.m., even as the ballots were still being
counted in many states where voters had waited in line well into the
night. The victory was far narrower than his historic election four
years ago, but it was no less dramatic.
"Tonight in this election, you, the American people,
reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has
been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back,"
Mr. Obama told his supporters early Wednesday. "We know in our hearts
that for the United States of America, the best is yet to come."
Mr. Obama's re-election extended his place in history,
carrying the tenure of the nation's first black president into a second
term. His path followed a pattern that has been an arc to his political
career: faltering when he seemed to be at his strongest - the period
before his first debate with Mr. Romney - before he redoubled his
efforts to lift himself and his supporters to victory.
The evening was not without the drama that has come to
mark so many recent elections: For more than 90 minutes after the
networks projected Mr. Obama as the winner, Mr. Romney held off calling
him to concede. And as the president waited to declare victory in
Chicago, Mr. Romney's aides were prepared to head to the airport,
suitcases packed, potentially to contest several close results.
But as it became increasingly clear that no amount of
contesting would bring him victory, he called Mr. Obama to concede
shortly before 1 a.m.
"I wish all of them well, but particularly the
president, the first lady and their daughters," Mr. Romney told his
supporters in Boston. "This is a time of great challenges for America,
and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation."
Hispanics made up an important part of Mr. Obama's
winning coalition, preliminary exit poll data showed. And before the
night was through, there were already recriminations from Republican
moderates who said Mr. Romney had gone too far during the primaries in
his statements against those here illegally, including his promise that
his get-tough policies would cause some to "self-deport."
Mr. Obama, 51, faces governing in a deeply divided
country and a partisan-rich capital, where Republicans retained their
majority in the House and Democrats kept their control of the Senate.
His re-election offers him a second chance that will quickly be tested,
given the rapidly escalating fiscal showdown.
For Mr. Obama, the result brings a ratification of his
sweeping health care act, which Mr. Romney had vowed to repeal. The law
will now continue on course toward nearly full implementation in 2014,
promising to change significantly the way medical services are
administrated nationwide.
Confident that the economy is finally on a true path
toward stability, Mr. Obama and his aides have hinted that he would seek
to tackle some of the grand but unrealized promises of his first
campaign, including the sort of immigration overhaul that has eluded
presidents of both parties for decades.
But he will be venturing back into a Congressional
environment similar to that of his first term, with the Senate under the
control of Democrats and the House under the control of Republicans,
whose leaders have hinted that they will be no less likely to challenge
him than they were during the last four years.
The state-by-state pursuit of 270 electoral votes was
being closely tracked by both campaigns, with Mr. Romney winning North
Carolina and Indiana, which Mr. Obama carried four years ago. But Mr.
Obama won Michigan, the state where Mr. Romney was born, and Minnesota, a
pair of states that Republican groups had spent millions trying to make
competitive.
Americans delivered a final judgment on a long and
bitter campaign that drew so many people to the polls that several key
states extended voting for hours. In Virginia and Florida, long lines
stretched from polling places, with the Obama campaign sending text
messages to supporters in those areas, saying: "You can still vote."
Neither party could predict how the outcome would
affect the direction of the Republican Party. Moderates were hopeful it
would lead the rank and file to realize that the party's grass-roots
conservatism that Mr. Romney pledged himself to during the primaries
doomed him in the general election. Tea Party adherents have indicated
that they will argue that he was damaged because of his move to middle
ground during the general election.
As he delivered his brief concession speech early
Wednesday, Mr. Romney did not directly address the challenges facing
Republicans. His advisers said that his second failed quest for the
White House would be his last, with his running mate, Representative
Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, standing as one of the leaders of the party.
"We have given our all to this campaign," said Mr.
Romney, stoic and gracious in his remarks. "I so wish that I had been
able to fulfill your hopes to lead this country in a different
direction."
The results were more a matter of voters giving Mr.
Obama more time than a second chance. Through most of the year slight
majorities of voters had told pollsters that they believed his policies
would improve the economy if they could stay in place into the future.
Mr. Obama's campaign team built its coalition the hard
way, through intensive efforts to find and motivate supporters who had
lost the ardor of four years ago and, Mr. Obama's strategists feared,
might not find their way to polls if left to their own devices.
Up against real enthusiasm for Mr. Romney - or, just as important, against Mr. Obama - among Republicans and many independents, their strategy of spending vast sums of money on their get-out-the-vote operation seemed vindicated on Tuesday.
As opinion surveys that followed the first debate
between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama showed a tightening race, Mr. Obama's
team had insisted that its coalition was coming together as it hoped it
would. In the end, it was not a bluff.
Even with Mr. Obama pulling off a new sweep of the
highly contested battlegrounds from Nevada to New Hampshire, the result
in each of the states was very narrow. The Romney campaign was taking
its time early Wednesday to review the outcome and searching for any
irregularities.
The top issue on the minds of voters was the economy,
according to interviews, with three-quarters saying that economic
conditions were not good or poor. But only 3 in 10 said things were
getting worse, and 4 in 10 said the economy was improving.
Mr. Romney, who campaigned aggressively on his ability
to turn around the deepest economic downturn since the Great
Depression, was given a narrow edge when voters were asked which
candidate was better equipped to handle the economy, the interviews
found.
The electorate was split along partisan lines over a
question that drove much of the campaign debate: whether it was Mr.
Obama or his predecessor, George W. Bush, who bore the most
responsibility for the nation's continued economic challenges. About 4
in 10 independent voters said that Mr. Bush should be held responsible.
The president built a muscular campaign organization
and used a strong financial advantage to hold off an array of forces
that opposed his candidacy. The margin of his victory was smaller than
in 2008 - he held an advantage of about 700,000 in the popular vote
early Wednesday - but a strategic firewall in several battleground
states protected his Electoral College majority.
As Mr. Romney gained steam and stature in the final
weeks of the campaign, the Obama campaign put its hopes in perhaps one
thing above all others: that the rebound in the auto industry after the
president's bailout package of 2009 would give him the winning edge in
Ohio, a linchpin of his road to re-election.
Early interviews with voters showed that just over
half of Ohio voters approved of the bailout, a result that was balanced
by a less encouraging sign for the president: Some 4 in 10 said they or
someone in their household had lost a job over the last four years.
He defeated Mr. Romney 52 percent to 47 percent in Hamilton County, home to Cincinnati, but only because of the number of votes he banked in the month leading up to Election Day.
Mr. Obama won despite losing some of his 2008 margins
among his key constituencies, including among younger voters, blacks and
Jewish voters, yet he appeared to increase his share among Hispanics
and Asians. Early exit poll results showed Latinos representing about 1
in 10 voters nationwide, and voting for Mr. Obama in greater numbers
than four years ago, making a difference in several states, including
Colorado and Florida.
He held on to female voters, according to preliminary
exit polls conducted by Edison Research, but he struggled even more
among white men than he did four years ago.
Mr. Romney's coalition included disproportionate support from whites, men, older people, high-income voters, evangelicals, those from suburban and rural counties, and those who call themselves adherents of the Tea Party - a group that had resisted him through the primaries but had fully embraced him by Election Day.
The Republican Party seemed destined for a new round
of self-reflection over how it approaches Hispanics going forward, a
fast-growing portion of the voting population that senior party
strategists had sought to woo before a strain of intense activism
against illegal immigration took hold within the Republican grass roots.
It was the first presidential election since the 2010
Supreme Court decision loosening restrictions on political spending, and
the first in which both major-party candidates opted out of the
campaign matching system that imposes spending limits in return for
federal financing. And the overall cost of the campaign rose
accordingly, with all candidates for federal office, their parties and
their supportive "super PACs" spending more than $6 billion combined.
The results Tuesday were certain to be parsed for days
to determine just what effect the spending had, and who would be more
irate at the answer - the donors who spent millions of dollars of
their own money for a certain outcome, or those who found a barrage of
negative advertising to be major factors in their defeats.
While the campaign often seemed small and petty, with
Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama intensely quarreling and bickering, the contest
was actually rooted in big and consequential decisions, with the role
of the federal government squarely at the center of the debate.
Though Mr. Obama's health care law galvanized his most
ardent opposition, and continually drew low ratings in polls as a
whole, interviews with voters found that nearly half wanted to see it
kept intact or expanded, a quarter wanted to see it repealed entirely
and another quarter said they wanted portions of it repealed.
In Chicago, as crowds waited for Mr. Obama to deliver
his speech, his supporters erupted into a roar of relief and elation.
Car horns honked from the street as people chanted the president's name.
"I feel like it's a repudiation of everything the
Republicans said in the campaign," said Jasmyne Walker, 31, who jumped
up and down on the edge of a stone planter in a downtown plaza.
"Everybody said that if he lost it would be buyer's remorse - that we
were high on hope in 2008. This says we're on the right track. I feel
like this confirms that."
1 comment:
I am certainly glad you are not our Sheriff. Talk about a bias lawman. Wow!
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