Unit 1
Passage One
The 2012 presidential election
Obama's win raises questions for Republicans
Nov 7th 2012, 9:13 by Lexington
A SHARPLY divided America has given President Barack Obama a second term: an extraordinary result given economic fundamentals that should have doomed the incumbent, according to the usual rules of electoral gravity.
Scotching fears of drawn-out legal wrangling over disputed ballots in dead-heat races, the result became clear soon after the polls closed on the west coast. After billions of dollars in campaign spending, many thousands of vicious attack ads and unprecedented interventions by deep-pocketed outside groups, the balance of power looked remarkably similar to how it did a day before. Mr Obama is on course to lose just two states that he had taken in 2008, Indiana and North Carolina. Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives and the Democrats kept hold of the Senate.
Mr Obama told supporters in Chicago that he had heard the call of voters to move beyond the partisan gridlock in Washington. He went out of his way to reach out to Republicans, with whom he must strike a deal to avoid the automatic spending cuts and tax rises that threaten to push America off a so-called fiscal cliff in the new year. He even promised to meet with Mitt Romney to discuss ideas for fixing the economy. In a nod to the speech that made his name, he vowed: “We remain more than a collection of red and blue states, we are and will forever remain the United States."
On the other side of the aisle, the questions now facing Republicans could hardly be bigger. A comforting interpretation of their defeat would point to Mr Romney’s showing in the popular vote, in which he is on course to lag Mr Obama by only a percentage point or two. It could be argued that this near-draw shows that millions of American voters are disappointed with the president and were ready to embrace a Republican alternative.
This reassuring narrative would blame Mr Romney and top aides for errors of campaign strategy, such as their failure to effectively combat the Obama campaign's summertime effort to define the Republican nominee as a heartless plutocrat. It would also point to Mr Obama’s superior ground game, which allied sophisticated, data-driven micro-targeting of voters with a vast network of field offices and volunteers to squeeze out every last vote in swing states.
Conservative Republicans will doubtless say that their party mistakenly chose a moderate, and paid the price for it. The right wing of the party never fully trusted Mr Romney, a businessman and a deal-maker more than an ideologue.
But Republicans cannot escape a reckoning with the demographic omens sent by this election. Whites accounted for only 72% of the electorate in 2012, according to exit polling by CNN, a television network. Mr Romney won that group (especially white men), as well as the elderly, by hefty margins. But that was not enough to defeat Mr Obama’s coalition of young people, women (especially single women and female college graduates), blacks and—above all—Hispanics.
