A divided America gives Obama four more years

Lawrence Alfred  Powell, Contributor

As anyone electronically connected to the civilised world knows by now, when the votes were tallied on Tuesday night, Barack Obama was re-elected to a second term as president of the United States.

This was hardly the massive landslide that had whisked him into office in 2008. The initial 'hope and change' honeymoon euphoria has faded now, replaced by a sober pragmatism. But given the obstacles he faced in this campaign, getting re-elected at all was quite an impressive achievement.

Obstacles? Well, for one, Obama is the first president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be re-elected in spite of persistent high unemployment levels and a stagnant economy. And like Roosevelt in 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, well over half of the people seem to have forgiven him for not being able to completely mend a severely damaged economy in just four years - so he's been granted an extension, to continue wrestling with the problem.

Also, like Roosevelt, many have recognised that Obama did not create the economic meltdown in the first place - that he's been dealt a bad hand by a previous administration's mismanagement.

Split down the middle

Obama has also had to preside over a country that's deeply divided, split down the middle with vicious ideological disagreements, in ways not seen since the Civil War era. Throughout his first term in office, Republican lawmakers rigidly closed ranks in an adamant 'no' stance against him, attempting to block all policy initiatives, including much-needed measures to stimulate jobs and the economy, with the acknowledged objective of seeing him fail and leaving the country suspended in a state of policy deadlock. (They were betting this would destroy him politically; it did not).

So, Obama has had to channel a bit of Abraham Lincoln as well. Surely, he must have woken up some mornings feeling as if fate had dealt him the absurd, Kafkaesque hand of having to serve as president during the Great Depression and the Civil War at the same time.

In the election last Tuesday, Obama managed to capture 50.3 per cent of the popular vote, to Romney's 48.1 per cent - not as impressive as in 2008, but enough to avoid the embarrassment of a popular-vote, electoral-vote mismatch. More important, with 270 electoral votes required to win, he took 303 in the states (or 332 if Florida finally falls into his column) to Romney's 206.

Obama and his strategists were able to accomplish this outcome by cultivating robust voter support in a 'firewall' of key battleground states, which proved impervious to Republican influence during the last months of the campaign. Of the swing states most frequently cited in the media as critical to an Electoral College win - Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Nevada - only one, North Carolina, went decisively to Romney. The rest went to Obama on Tuesday night. The firewall held, and then some.

Obama won by wide margins in the Northeast (Massachusetts, New York, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Rhode Island, Delaware). He also won by large margins in the Pacific West (California, Oregon, Washington), and and in the upper Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio). In addition to these, he picked up the states of Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico. Florida is very close and still uncertain, but at the moment counts show him ahead by a razor-thin margin of 49.9 per cent to 49.3 per cent there as well.

Regional and ideological divides

In a pattern that exemplifies the regional and ideological divides plaguing the nation, Romney swept the southern states by similarly large margins (except Florida), as well as much of the Prairie and Mountain West. But because he could not, in the end, penetrate Obama's upper Midwest firewall of Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, and Ohio, he was unable to overcome Obama's electoral advantage during the closing weeks of the campaign, despite stronger-than-expected debate performances and a late surge in the polls that cut into Obama's lead in many states by up to five percentage points.

In the Senate races, 33 out of 100 seats were up for re-election. Leading into Tuesday's election Democrats had 53 Senate seats (if one includes the two independents who usually vote with the Dems), to 47 for the Republicans. Democrats gained two seats, and they'll now have 55 to the Republicans' 45. (Fifty-one are needed for a majority). Notable wins that could work to Obama's advantage in a second term included Elizabeth Warren, defeating Scott Brown in Massachusetts, and Claire McCaskill, defeating Todd Akin in Missouri.

In the House, all 435 seats were up for election. Republicans will continue to hold the majority, with 234 seats to the Democrats' 193. Notably, Alan Grayson of Florida, the fiercest critic of Republican legislative obstructionism in the House, was returned to his seat by voters, after having lost it in the 2010 midterm.

After the post-election 'we won' partying stops for the Democrats this week, the humbling realisation will slowly begin to set in again that after over a year of continuous campaigning, and billions raised and spent by both major parties on this election in a world where many go hungry - the status quo has held. The result is that the same president still faces a hostile, Republican-dominated House which, unless it decides to modify its ways, will continue blocking legislative initiatives needed to stimulate jobs and growth.

Of course, it could have been worse. We could have a hung-jury election result like the 2000 Bush-Gore fiasco, with the outcome disputed for weeks. Or, if Obama had won the Electoral College but with Romney slightly ahead in the popular vote, we could be seeing lots of people in the streets right now, but they wouldn't be celebrating.

Lawrence Alfred Powell is honorary research fellow at the Centre of Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and the former polling director for the Centre for Leadership and Governance at UWI, Mona. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and lapowell.auckland@ymail.com.

National vote, and vote in the key swing states, in 2012 US election (percentages)

SWING STATES