Barack 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.
Republicans retained their majority in the House and Democrats kept their control of the Senate.
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 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. 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. Mr. Obama won despite losing the support of white voters by wide margins. Overall, he lost this group by 19 percentage points, even larger than his 12-point loss in 2008.
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interviews with voters found that nearly half wanted to see it kept intact or expanded, a quarter wanted to see it repealed entirely and another quarter said they wanted
portions of it repealed.
Defying predictions that their participation would be lackluster, Latinos turned out in record numbers on Tuesday and voted for President Obama by broad margins, tipping the balance in at least three swing states and securing their position as an organized force in American politics with the power to move national elections. Over all, according to exit polls not yet finalized by Edison Research, Mr. Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote while Mitt Romney won 27 percent. The gap of 44 percentage points was even greater than Mr. Obama’s 36-point advantage over John McCain in 2008.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Wash Post Morning Fix:
There was plenty of GOP griping toward the end of the 2012 election that pollsters were skewing their samples too Democratic.
How could the electorate be nearly as friendly for Obama as it was in 2008 when 2008 was such a good year for Democrats, people argued.
Well guess what. The electorate wasn’t just almost as friendly for Obama; it was probably more friendly.
The electorate was less white (from 74 percent in 2008 to 72 percent this year), more Latino (9 percent to 10 percent), just as African-American (13 percent to 13 percent), more female (53 percent to 54 percent), more low-income (38 percent making less than $50,000 in 2008 to 41 percent Tuesday) and — perhaps most remarkably, younger (18 percent to 19 percent).
It all suggests that Obama’s laser-like focus [with probably the greatest nationwide 'get out the vote' groundgame in the history of American politics] on turning out each of his key constituencies — minorities, women and young people — paid dividends.
Young voters favored President Obama, but less so than in 2008. However, he managed to improve his share of the youth vote in swing states like Ohio, Florida and Virginia where his campaign most actively targeted voters.
Women gave Obama 55 percent of the vote and low-income voters gave him 60 percent, about the same as four years ago.
Binders full of women—a record number—will serve in Congress, marking a flurry of firsts, including the first openly gay U.S. senator and the first Hindu-American in Congress. The obsession with contraception, the ‘legitimate rape’ kerfuffle, the attacks on Planned Parenthood—all combined to sink Romney and other GOP candidates on Election Day. Women clocked in with some of the most dramatic wins and fails of the year, with Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Maggie Hassan triumphing, and Republican Linda McMahon suffering a multimillion-dollar blow.
Latinos gave Obama 67 percent of their vote four years ago, and 71 percent on Tuesday.
And Democrats supported Obama even more than they did four years ago, with his share of the Democratic vote rising from 89 percent to 92 percent.
Republicans gave Nate Silver (above) a hard time for projecting that Obama would win 313 electoral votes. If Obama carries Florida (as it appears he will), he will have won 332 electoral votes. Nate Silver, the nation’s 34-year old Delphic oracle can look on his mighty empire of polling data, and smile: he nailed it. Again.
Big wins for gay rights and marijuana: Ballot referenda in several states provided big wins for advocates of gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana, and Wisconsin even elected the first gay U.S. senator in Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D).
Washington state and Colorado passed the marijuana measures, while Maine and Maryland passed gay marriage legislation. In each case, the votes were unprecedented.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Daily Beast: by Robert Shrum
Noam Scheiber The New Republic
November 7, 2012
In the end, the Romney campaign clearly misread the landscape. They believed that frustration with the economy would suffice to dislodge the president—that the race would ultimately be about the incumbent and not the challenger. And they weren’t crazy to think so. Some 75 percent of voters rated the economy as either “not good” or “poor.” In Ohio and Florida, voters had more confidence in Romney’s ability to fix it.
What Romneyland missed was that the race was never entirely a referendum on the struggling economy (which, as it happened, far more people still blame on George W. Bush rather than Obama). It was also a referendum on fairness—how else to explain that 60 percent of voters nationally believe the rich should pay more taxes? In that sort of environment, Romney was never going to be an ideal candidate. But the refusal to make the slightest accommodation to Americans’ growing sense of grievance will go down as a historical blunder.