with room to spare
President Obama overcame a bad economy, high unemployment and a fractured political landscape to win a second term in the White House Tuesday night, defeating challenger Mitt Romney by taking several key battleground states.
Long before he hit the campaign trail, President Obama and the members of his team said the strategy of Republicans to re-take the White House was simple: dig in their heels, forget bipartisan solutions to America’s problems; thwart all of his initiatives to drag the country out of the depths of the Great Recession; count on the economy getting worse over four years; and then come election time blame it all on him.
If that was the strategy – and at times, it appeared to many, observers and all, as though it could have been – the American public did not buy it.
Despite being hammered over four years by a well funded opposition party that blamed the state of the economy and unemployment on his alleged ineptitude and bad choices, Barack Obama was re-elected president of the United States on Tuesday and it wasn’t even a nail-biter photo finish end as many people thought it would be.
CNN was projecting Obama the winner by Electoral College votes with room to spare. By midnight Eastern Standard Time (EST) with vote results in from most states, Mr. Obama had secured the 270 votes in the Electoral College needed to win re-election and a second term as President of the United States.
In beating challenger Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama carried Wisconsin, Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado and Virginia and was holding on to a narrow advantage in Ohio and Florida late Tuesday night.
Early on it became obvious the path to victory for Mr. Romney was narrow and it got narrower as the night wore on.
Mr. Romney conceded the race to President Obama early Wednesday, telling supporters he had wished Mr. Obama well during a telephone call moments before coming on stage at his headquarters.
“This is a time of great challenges for America, and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation,” said Romney.
In one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country, Elizabeth Warren defeated Republican Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Despite the loss at the top of the ticket, the GOP retained its control of the House.
Following projections by the Associated Press and all the major networks that he had won, Obama tweeted on his official Twitter account: “We’re all in this together. That’s how we campaigned, and that’s who we are. Thank you.”
In the end, President Barack Obama won re-election exactly the way his campaign had predicted: running up big margins with women and minorities, mobilizing a sophisticated registration and get-out-the-vote operation, and focusing narrowly on the battleground states that would determine the election.
It wasn’t always exciting, and it was hardly transformational. But it worked.
“The Obama campaign laid out its plan, told everyone what they were doing and executed,” said Anita Dunn, a former Obama White House official who advised the campaign through the fall. “No one should be surprised.”
Obama won in part by building a strong coalition of young people, minorities, and college educated women and then cranking up a powerful ground game that turned those supporters out to vote in droves in crucial states like Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin.
The popular vote nationally however was split down the middle indicating a still polarized America.
For the President his re-election also confirms the popularity of his overhaul of the country’s health care laws – The Affordable Care Act – which Mr. Romney had vowed to repeal if he were elected.
