It was a suitably exhilarating end to the most thrilling presidential race in a generation. This was the longest election in American history, and the most expensive by far. It was also, on the Democratic side, the hardest-fought, with Hillary Clinton amassing almost as many primary votes as Barack Obama. But on November 4th the result was clear: Mr Obama beat John McCain by six points in the popular vote (52% to 46%) and 190 votes in the electoral college (364 votes to 174).
A sense of history in the making hung over the election: a country that has been torn apart by race peacefully elected a black man to the highest office in the land. Mr Obama’s volunteers wore T-shirts inscribed with the slogan “Making history”. People across the country cheered and wept when the result was announced. Both Mr Obama and Mr McCain gave speeches worthy of a turning point.It was a turning point without any inconvenient drama. The stalemate in 2000 plunged America into two months of turmoil. Four years later the early exit polls suggested that John Kerry had won the election—and the final result did not emerge until 3am. The networks declared that Mr Obama had won at 11pm eastern time, as soon as the polls closed on the west coast, and Mr McCain made his concession speech shortly afterwards. But most people knew that Mr Obama had the election in the bag two hours earlier, when he won Ohio after easily holding on to Pennsylvania.
Mr Obama will enter the White House in January with a clear mandate to govern. He is the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win more than 50% of the vote (Mr Carter won 50.1%). He also has solid Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House (see article). But the election was nevertheless a little short of the landslide that many Democrats had hoped for and even expected.
Mr McCain’s 46% of the vote was surprisingly high given the headwinds that he had to contend with. The Democrats fell short of winning a 60-seat filibuster proof majority in the Senate. Mr Obama continued to do badly with the same white working-class voters that he had failed to connect with during the primary.
All change
Nevertheless, Mr Obama succeeded in unfreezing an electoral map that had been frozen for the past eight years. He won huge victories in Democratic strongholds in the north-east and on the west coast. He triumphed all over the industrial Midwest. He won two big prizes that eluded the Democrats in 2000 and 2004: Florida (by two points) and Ohio (by four). He expanded the Democratic imperium to include Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. He also narrowly won Virginia, home to the capital of the old Confederacy, and a state that has not voted Democratic in a presidential election since 1964. He seems to have scraped a remarkable victory in North Carolina.
But Mr Obama did not really succeed in abolishing what David Axelrod, his chief strategist, calls the “dreary math of red state and blue state”: the Republicans still dominate the South and the Great Plains. Mr Obama’s 50-state strategy nevertheless paid rich dividends. It helped the Democrats win down-ticket races. It forced Mr McCain to devote his time and resources to defending what should have been solid Republican states, such as Georgia. On election day Mr Obama had many different paths to victory. Mr McCain had only one: he needed to hold almost all the states that George Bush won in 2004, and flip Pennsylvania to compensate for any losses. But Pennsylvania eventually voted for Mr Obama by 11 points.
In the same way Mr Obama succeeded in putting together an electoral coalition that was impressive without being revolutionary. Mr Obama’s victory was largely a result of his huge margins among his core supporters—younger voters and minorities. He won 95% of the black vote compared with John Kerry’s 88%. He won 66% of people aged 18-29 and 68% of first-time voters. But he did not break through to the “bitter” voters that have long troubled him. He lost whites without a college education by 18 points—only a small improvement on Mr Kerry’s result—and voters aged 65 and over by eight points.
But there were nevertheless some significant trends beneath the surface of these predictable figures. Mr Obama won 66% of the Latino vote. He also won Latinos in Florida by an impressive 15 points, a group that voted Republican by 12 points just four years ago. George Bush was inordinately proud of winning 44% of Latinos in 2004. The Republican Party’s nativist rejection of immigration reform has clearly cost it dear.
Mr Obama did well among the meritocracy. He did better than Mr Kerry among whites with a college education, a group that voted for Mr Bush in 2004, and which helped to carry him over the finish line in Virginia and Colorado, states with higher than average concentrations of the college-educated. He improved his party’s performance among voters who earn more than $200,000 a year by 17 points.
Mr Obama’s relentless courting of middle-of-the road voters also paid off, providing him with some evidence that he has succeeded in crossing the red-blue divide. He beat Mr McCain among independents (Mr McCain’s supposed power-base) by eight points. Almost one in five voters who voted for Mr Bush four years ago shifted to Mr Obama. He won 54% of Catholics, a vital swing group in big industrial states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio. (Mr Kerry, himself a Catholic, won 47%.)
How did Mr Obama, a man who was a state senator just four years ago, pull off such a remarkable performance? The vote was as much a verdict on the past eight years of Republican rule, particularly the past four years of Mr Bush’s presidency, with its cack-handed response to Hurricane Katrina, its mishandling of the war in Iraq and its exploding budget deficits.
Throughout his campaign Mr McCain was haunted by two unavoidable numbers: three-quarters of Americans think that America is on the “wrong track” and two-thirds disapprove of Mr Bush’s performance as president. Half of voters said that they believed that Mr McCain would continue Mr Bush’s policies as president—and 90% of those voted for Mr Obama.
But Mr Obama exploited this disaffection like a master. He defeated the Clinton machine by understanding the magic of two words: “change” and “hope”. And he turned an inchoate rage at Mr Bush’s administration—a rage that had once threatened to drive the Democratic Party into undisciplined extremism—into the most effective machine seen in American politics for a very long time.
In both 2000 and (particularly) 2004 the Republicans won close elections by building a better political machine. This time the Democrats turned the tables. Mr Obama not only used his financial advantage to dominate the airwaves (he ran almost 140 ads a day in Pennsylvania in the week of October 21st-28th, for example). He also dominated on the ground, deploying armies of volunteers to knock on doors and drive people to the polls. In Ohio 53% of people told exit pollsters that they had been contacted personally by the Obama campaign, compared with 36% who heard from the McCain campaign.
But what finally persuaded a right-of-centre country to support a left-of-centre candidate was the economy in general, and the Wall Street meltdown in particular. Ninety-three per cent of voters said that the economy was in a bad way, and a full 81% worried about their financial future. Mr Obama led by nine points among the 63% of voters who said that the economy was their top concern. Worries about the economy allowed Mr Obama to shift attention from Mr McCain’s strong suit, foreign policy, and shore up his support among sceptical blue-collar voters. “Forget drill, baby, drill,” said Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michigan. “Here, it’s jobs, baby, jobs.”
Arguably the moment when Mr Obama won the campaign was in mid-September, when the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers triggered the worst financial crisis since the Depression. Undecided voters concluded that Mr Obama’s calm and cerebral style was exactly what Americans needed in difficult times. And they worried about Mr McCain’s temperament and judgment—especially his insistence that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” From mid-September onwards Mr Obama enjoyed a lead in the polls that Mr McCain found impossible to break.
“Change” has rightly been the most popular word in this singular election season. The election changed the machinery of politics. The system of regulating campaign finance that was created after Watergate was shredded. The internet changed the way that politicians raise money and organise volunteers: YouTube, a ubiquitous force this year, did not even exist four years ago, and Facebook, which Mr Obama made enormous use of, had only been invented a few months earlier.
And the election has altered the election map: the Commonwealth of Virginia can now be added to the list of swing states, as can Indiana and North Carolina. The election also speeded up long-standing changes in the two parties: the Republican Party, having long ago shed its country club associations, is fast becoming much more of a Wal-Mart party. The Democrats are becoming the minority-meritocracy party, an alliance joining upscale whites with blacks and Hispanics of all income levels.
But for all the historical significance of Mr Obama’s victory it would be a mistake to over-interpret it: excited talk among liberals of the dawn of a new age of liberal activism is premature. The proportion of voters describing themselves as liberals, moderates and conservatives was almost the same as in 2004. The number of people who said that government should be more active was only slightly higher than four years ago—and fully 43% said that government was doing too much. In his admirable victory speech Mr Obama warned against hubris and promised to reach out to the people who did not vote for him. Heeding those calm words could be the key to a successful presidency.
From The Economist print edition
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