Barack Obama was elected to a second presidential term Tuesday, defeating Republican Mitt Romney by reassembling the political coalition that boosted him to victory four years ago and remaking himself from a hopeful uniter into a determined fighter for middle-class interests.
Obama, the nation’s first African American president, scored a decisive electoral college victory by stringing together a series of narrow wins in hotly contested states. Of the election’s seven major battlegrounds, he won at least six.
After one of the most bitter and costliest campaigns in history, he sought to strike a healing and hopeful note with a victory speech early Wednesday morning that was as rhetorically ambitious as his first debate performance was mediocre.
“While our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up,” Obama told an ecstatic crowd of supporters in the cavernous exhibition space of McCormick Place Lakeside Center in Chicago early Wednesday. “We have fought our way back. And we know in our hearts that, for the United States of America, the best is yet to come.”
He said he intends to sit down with Romney in the weeks ahead to talk about how the two can work together.
“We can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests,” Obama said. “We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America.”
Obama also made an oblique reference to the hard, negative edge of his campaign, saying that even this bitter election was something to be envied by nations around the world that enjoy fewer freedoms: “These arguments we have,” he said, “are a mark of our liberty.”
The presidential election capped a night of gains for the once beaten-down American left. Democrats Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts won Senate races, as the party kept control of that chamber. Liberal causes also won in several states: Maryland and Maine became the first to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. Colorado and Washington passed laws that legalized some marijuana use.
Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, had built his campaign around the single contention that the U.S. economy is battered and adrift because of Obama’s failures, and that his business experience uniquely qualified him to fix it.
In the end, that wasn’t enough, in part because the economy undermined his argument by showing signs of improvement. Just weeks before Election Day, the national unemployment rate dropped below 8 percent for the first time since Obama took office.
Voters also did not warm to Romney. Even after many months and millions of dollars put toward trying to make him look good, exit polls showed that just as many voters trusted Obama to handle the economy as trusted Romney.
“This is a time of great challenges for America, and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation,” a slightly hoarse Romney told his supporters in Boston early Wednesday morning. He said he and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), had left “everything on the field,” adding: “I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes.”
Obama, the nation’s first African American president, scored a decisive electoral college victory by stringing together a series of narrow wins in hotly contested states. Of the election’s seven major battlegrounds, he won at least six.
After one of the most bitter and costliest campaigns in history, he sought to strike a healing and hopeful note with a victory speech early Wednesday morning that was as rhetorically ambitious as his first debate performance was mediocre.
“While our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up,” Obama told an ecstatic crowd of supporters in the cavernous exhibition space of McCormick Place Lakeside Center in Chicago early Wednesday. “We have fought our way back. And we know in our hearts that, for the United States of America, the best is yet to come.”
He said he intends to sit down with Romney in the weeks ahead to talk about how the two can work together.
“We can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests,” Obama said. “We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America.”
Obama also made an oblique reference to the hard, negative edge of his campaign, saying that even this bitter election was something to be envied by nations around the world that enjoy fewer freedoms: “These arguments we have,” he said, “are a mark of our liberty.”
The presidential election capped a night of gains for the once beaten-down American left. Democrats Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts won Senate races, as the party kept control of that chamber. Liberal causes also won in several states: Maryland and Maine became the first to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. Colorado and Washington passed laws that legalized some marijuana use.
Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, had built his campaign around the single contention that the U.S. economy is battered and adrift because of Obama’s failures, and that his business experience uniquely qualified him to fix it.
In the end, that wasn’t enough, in part because the economy undermined his argument by showing signs of improvement. Just weeks before Election Day, the national unemployment rate dropped below 8 percent for the first time since Obama took office.
Voters also did not warm to Romney. Even after many months and millions of dollars put toward trying to make him look good, exit polls showed that just as many voters trusted Obama to handle the economy as trusted Romney.
“This is a time of great challenges for America, and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation,” a slightly hoarse Romney told his supporters in Boston early Wednesday morning. He said he and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), had left “everything on the field,” adding: “I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes.”