Obama wins re-election, sees better days ahead

Improving consumer confidence, housing market and employment situation help Obama become first US president to be re-elected with a jobless rate of over 7.2% since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936

Barack Hussein Obama was yesterday re-elected President of the United States on Tuesday, beating a strong challenge by Republican contender Mitt Romney.

Obama won Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin, the battleground states, and held a narrow advantage in Florida. The margins narrowed for Romney, with Obama winning at least 303 of the 538 electoral votes.

A cheer of jubilation sounded at the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago when the television networks began projecting him as the winner at 11.20 pm yesterday, even as the ballots were still being counted in many states where voters had waited in line well into the night. The victory was far narrower than his historic election four years ago, but it was no less dramatic.

“Tonight in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back,” Obama told his supporters early on Wednesday. “We know in our hearts that for the United States of America, the best is yet to come.”

Growing optimism about the economy and a big turnout of the core Democratic coalition sealed Obama’s re-election victory. After years of bleak economic news, enough Americans now believe better days lie ahead for the US economy. The coalition of young, female and minority voters that propelled Obama to victory four years ago also turned out again, in huge numbers.

“I thought four years ago there was an enduring Obama electorate, and that is what we've seen tonight,” said Tad Devine, a veteran Democratic strategist. “It’s made up of African-Americans, Latinos, single women and young people,” he said. “You combine that with blue-collar union workers and upper-educated whites, and you have a majority, especially in battleground states.”

Romney also appeared to have overplayed his hand when it came to his central campaign argument that the US economy was in dire straights because of Obama’s bungled fiscal stewardship. Obama effectively swept the American Midwest, the county’s industrial heartland. Romney’s efforts to convince voters that America’s stubbornly high unemployment rate of 7.9 per cent was all Obama’s fault appeared to have backfired. Early national exit polls revealed that about 50 per cent of US voters still blamed former Republican President George W Bush for the country's economic problems rather than Obama.

Bill Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to former Democratic President Bill Clinton, said Obama clinched victory because a range of economic factors improved in the past six months. Galston said the jobless rate had been ticking downwards, the housing market appeared to have stabilised with home prices finally rising, and consumer confidence had been improving.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in the week before the election reflected how voters’ views of the economy had been improving steadily. “The president’s handling of the economy had to be the centrepiece of Romney’s campaign,” Galston said. “He had no choice. But all sorts of economic signs perked up in the past six months — and just in time for the president.”

No US president has won re-election with an unemployment rate of over 7.2 per cent since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.