Obama bets electorate matches 2008 _ and wins

WASHINGTON (AP) — Barack Obama and Mitt Romney made sharply different bets about who would vote this year.

It turned out that Americans who cast ballots looked collectively much more like what Obama had envisioned — a diverse tapestry that reflected a changing America — than the whiter, older electorate Romney had banked on.

Younger voters and minorities came to the polls at levels not far off from the historic coalition Obama assembled in 2008. The reality caught off-guard Republicans who banked on a more monolithic voting body sending them to the White House — and who had based their polling on that assumption.

The outcome revealed a stark problem for Republicans: If they don't broaden their tent, they won't move forward.

And it foreshadowed changes over the next generation that could put long-held Republican states onto the political battleground maps of the future.

"Clearly, when you look at African-American and Latino voters, they went overwhelmingly for the president," said John Stineman, a Republican strategist from Iowa. "And that's certainly a gap that's going to require a lot of attention from Republicans."

In exit polling Tuesday, voters mirrored the voting public's makeup of four years ago, when Obama shattered minority voting barriers and drove young voters to the polls unlike any candidate in generations.

White voters made up 72 percent of the electorate — less than four years ago — while black voters remained at 13 percent and Hispanics increased from 9 percent to 10 percent.

That flew in the face of GOP assumptions that the fierce economic headwinds of the past three years and the passing of the novelty of the first African-American president would trim Obama's support from black voters, perhaps enough to make the difference in a close election.

However, Obama carried Virginia, the heart of the old South, in part by having increased his record support from black voters there in 2008, which reached 18 percent, to more than 20 percent, according to Obama campaign internal tracking polls.

It was also reflected in turnout that matched his 2008 totals in places like Cleveland, which helped Obama carry Ohio solidly despite Romney's all-out effort there in the campaign's final weeks.

"Republicans have been saying for months" that Obama's black support would slip, Democratic pollster Paul Maslin said. "And what happens? When African-Americans had the chance to affirm him, they came out in droves."

Obama won in 2008 by carrying several long-held Republican states, including North Carolina, Virginia and Indiana. And while Romney easily carried Indiana and narrowly peeled back North Carolina, the fact that Obama held Virginia points to a long-term demographic shift that survived the pressures of the poor economy.

Obama carried each contested state except North Carolina by aggressively registering first-time voters. He matched his share of the youth vote from 2008, and nearly matched his support from seniors.

The 2012 electorate mirrored 2008 in terms of party identification and racial makeup, with self-identified Democrats topping Republicans and independents.

During his victory speech Tuesday, Obama nodded to the Democratic coalition he had held together.

"It doesn't matter if you're black or white, or Hispanic or Asian, or Native American, or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight," Obama told his crowd of supporters gathered in Chicago. "You can make it here in America if you're willing to try."

The minority and youth turnout was not the only assumption Romney made that turned out to be wrong.

While voters considered the economy the driving issue in the election, they did not hold Obama wholly responsible, as Romney long had assumed they would.

That realization forced Romney to pivot late in the campaign and attempt to turn the election into a choice of competing visions. Republicans argued late in the campaign that Romney's performance during the first of three debates had energized a groundswell of enthusiasm seen in their polling.

But it seemed Obama's support was quietly amassing with more vigor, GOP strategists said.

"There really wasn't an enthusiasm gap," said Republican strategist Charlie Black, an informal Romney adviser. "And independents didn't break our way."

In California, a Tight Battle Over a Tax Initiative to Help Schools

SAN FRANCISCO — California voters weighed in on a ballot measure Tuesday that would raise taxes by $6 billion annually over seven years, bringing an end to an acrimonious, $123 million battle between Gov. Jerry Brown, who said the money was necessary to save the state’s public schools, and conservative opponents in and outside the state.

With 53 percent of precincts reporting, and recent polls indicating that the campaign over the measure was too close to call, its fate remained unclear.

Such a struggle was not unique to California. Voters in 38 states considered more than 170 ballot measures on a range of fiscal, political and social issues that in many cases resonated nationally.

Voters in Colorado and Washington made their states the first to legalize marijuana for recreational use. In Oregon, a similar measure appeared headed for defeat.

Supporters of Washington’s initiative said they hoped its passage would ultimately change federal law, which regards any possession or sale of marijuana as illegal.

“By sending this message, we can hopefully have a collaborative conversation with the federal government, and that they can see that their policy can be done differently and that prohibition is not working,” said Tonia S. Winchester, outreach director for the campaign behind the measure, Yes on I-502.

In Maryland, voters endorsed a ballot measure allowing in-state tuition at public colleges for illegal immigrants. Massachusetts was considering whether to legalize physician-assisted suicide for people with terminal illnesses. Though most of the votes were counted, the result was too close to call.

But nowhere was the fight over ballot measures fiercer than in California, where spending on campaigning for and against 11 measures totaled nearly $370 million, according toMapLight, an organization that tracks campaign spending.

Under Mr. Brown’s tax initiative, or Proposition 30, income tax rates for those earning more than $250,000 annually would be raised for seven years, and a one-quarter-cent increase in the state sales tax would be put in place for four years. Without the new revenue, Mr. Brown said, California would need to cut $6 billion a year in spending, mostly from the state’s already battered education system — a threat that appeared to have persuaded some voters on Tuesday.

“We need more funding for the schools,” said Omega Jules, 31, who lives in Oakland and works for United Parcel Service of America. “They keep taking money out of education, and that is where we need it most.”

Supported by California teachers’ unions, Mr. Brown was tenacious in seeking support for the initiative, but he encountered fierce and sometimes unexpected opposition. Last month, an obscure Arizona group called Americans for Responsible Leadership donated $11 million, in part to defeat Proposition 30. Also, Molly Munger, a civil rights lawyer and the daughter of Warren E. Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway, Charles Munger, spent more than $44 million on a rival tax measure, Proposition 38, which was overwhelmingly defeated.

About $135 million was spent in the battle over Proposition 32, which would outlaw political donations by labor unions.

Also in California, voters considered an initiative to end the death penalty. Supporters, including law enforcement officials, argued that administering the death penalty was inefficient and that eliminating it would save the state money. The argument appeared to have swayed voters, even those who did not oppose the practice on moral grounds.

“It would be one thing if they said they were going to kill a criminal and then did it the next day,” said Lamarr Standberry, an Oakland resident who voted to repeal the death penalty. “If you’re going to do it, then just do it already. Instead it takes forever and costs a lot.”

Voters appeared to endorse a measure that would make the state’s three-strikes law somewhat more lenient by imposing a life sentence only for a third felony conviction considered serious or violent. California also considered a measure to make mandatory the labeling of genetically modified food.

Two crucial education measures put charter schools on state ballots. By a wide margin, Georgia voters approved an amendment to the state Constitution that will allow for the creation of a commission to authorize new charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently operated. The measure drew national attention and campaign contributions from Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton, Walmart’s founder, and Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party organization founded by the billionaire Koch brothers.

In Washington, voters were asked to allow charters into the state for the first time. Similar measures had failed three times in the past 16 years.

Michigan voters considered a measure that would expand the powers of emergency administrators to take over financially troubled local governments, and the ability of governors to appoint them. Another proposal that would make collective bargaining a right for employees in the public and private sectors appeared headed for defeat.

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Displaced by Hurricane, but Returning Home, Briefly, to Vote

Just after daybreak, under a pink-hued sky, the first voters began to pick their way through the sand and muck that had been the streets of Bay Head, N.J. Sidestepping the occasional dead fish with its one-eyed stare, they steadily found their way to the firehouse, where a huge generator powered one of the few sources of heat in the tiny seaside borough.

From dawn till past nightfall on Tuesday, displaced residents from dozens of storm-smashed communities up and down the New York and New Jersey coastlines streamed home, gathering with their neighbors for the first time sinceHurricane Sandy, with one simple goal in mind.

“I wasn’t going to let no hurricane stop me from voting,” said Amos Eberhard, 61, of Queens, who journeyed 90 minutes by bus to the Rockaways from Brooklyn to cast his ballot.

For many people whose hometowns have been evacuated, whose houses were damaged by flooding or fire, or whose regular polling places were rendered unusable by a lack of electrical power, this was an Election Day unlike any in memory.

On Staten Island, voters from flooded-out neighborhoods trudged past National Guard trucks on a sports field and a line of drivers desperate to buy fuel by the local high school, where some said through tears that they had lost everything but their determination.

In Long Beach, the Long Island city that suffered some of the storm’s worst damage, Jose Barcia, a waiter who immigrated from Franco’s Spain — and withstood five feet of water on his first floor last week — said he was grateful just to be able to cast a ballot.

“I love America,” Mr. Barcia said, after voting in a darkened elementary school, where hundreds of people, some walking with canes, pushing strollers or clutching pets, clamored to vote.

And on the barrier islands of New Jersey, where emergency workers from around the nation are removing debris and downed power lines and plowing piles of sand to make the streets passable, Ocean County officials drove a bus across Barnegat Bay to deliver provisional ballots to National Guard troops, Red Cross volunteers, firefighters and law enforcement officers.

Aboard the bus, poll workers rolled into Ortley Beach to see a moonscape of vanished homes or their skeletal remains. In a supermarket parking lot, they found an Army mess tent, a Navy heater and police officers including Summer Cunliffe, 29, of Lakewood, serving up chili, soup and corn bread to relief workers.

Officer Cunliffe said she was grateful for the opportunity to vote, because her attention had been focused on other matters.

“The biggest thing was getting out here and giving the hard-working men and women the food to eat to keep them going,” she said.

Throughout New York, some displaced residents seeking to use provisional ballots to vote away from home reported problems from elections officials who declined to accept them. And in New Jersey, so many displaced residents sought to vote by e-mail or fax that the state extended by three days the deadline for returning provisional ballots, to 8 p.m. on Friday.

But in the hardest-hit locales, municipal officials and ordinary citizens insisted not just on their right to vote, but to do so as close to home as possible.

In Bay Head, where nearly all 800 voters had been evacuated for the storm, Ocean County officials did not think there were enough people currently in the borough to warrant a polling place. But Mayor William Curtis mounted a fierce resistance, and on Monday, the county relented.

“They didn’t want to deliver voting booths down here,” Mr. Curtis said. “They wanted us to go across the bridge because they didn’t think there was going to be enough people here to vote. I just said, ‘No, no, no.’ ”

He added: “This is us. This is our home.”

So Bay Head’s refugees filled the firehouse Tuesday, exchanging survival stories and recovery updates: Who has water? Hot water? Heat? Propane?

“I’m going to vote in here all day long — it’s nice and warm,” declared Brent Wentz, 72, as he arrived early Tuesday.

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Obama Wins New Term as Electoral Advantage Holds

Barack Hussein Obama was re-elected president of the United States on Tuesday, overcoming powerful economic headwinds, a lock-step resistance to his agenda by Republicans in Congress and an unprecedented torrent of advertising as a divided nation voted to give him more time.

In defeating Mitt Romney, the president carried Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin, a near sweep of the battleground states, and was holding a narrow advantage in Florida. The path to victory for Mr. Romney narrowed as the night wore along, with Mr. Obama winning at least 303 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 p.m., 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,” Mr. Obama told his supporters early Wednesday. “We know in our hearts that for the United States of America, the best is yet to come.”

Mr. Obama’s re-election extended his place in history, carrying the tenure of the nation’s first black president into a second term. His path followed a pattern that has been an arc to his political career: faltering when he seemed to be at his strongest — the period before his first debate with Mr. Romney — before he redoubled his efforts to lift himself and his supporters to victory.

The evening was not without the drama that has come to mark so many recent elections: For more than 90 minutes after the networks projected Mr. Obama as the winner, Mr. Romney held off calling him to concede. And as the president waited to declare victory in Chicago, Mr. Romney’s aides were prepared to head to the airport, suitcases packed, potentially to contest several close results.

But as it became increasingly clear that no amount of contesting would bring him victory, he called Mr. Obama to concede shortly before 1 a.m.

“I wish all of them well, but particularly the president, the first lady and their daughters,” Mr. Romney told his supporters in Boston. “This is a time of great challenges for America, and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation.”

Hispanics made up an important part of Mr. Obama’s winning coalition, preliminary exit poll data showed. And before the night was through, there were already recriminations from Republican moderates who said Mr. Romney had gone too far during the primaries in his statements against those here illegally, including his promise that his get-tough policies would cause some to “self-deport.”

Mr. Obama, 51, faces governing in a deeply divided country and a partisan-rich capital, where Republicans retained their majority in the House and Democrats kept their control of the Senate. His re-election offers him a second chance that will quickly be tested, given the rapidly escalating fiscal showdown.

For Mr. Obama, the result brings a ratification of his sweeping health care act, which Mr. Romney had vowed to repeal. The law will now continue on course toward nearly full implementation in 2014, promising to change significantly the way medical services are administrated nationwide.

Confident that the economy is finally on a true path toward stability, Mr. Obama and his aides have hinted that he would seek to tackle some of the grand but unrealized promises of his first campaign, including the sort of immigration overhaul that has eluded presidents of both parties for decades.

But he will be venturing back into a Congressional environment similar to that of his first term, with the Senate under the control of Democrats and the House under the control of Republicans, whose leaders have hinted that they will be no less likely to challenge him than they were during the last four years.

Republicans Face Struggle Over Party’s Direction

Mitt Romney’s loss to a Democratic president wounded by a weak economy is certain to spur an internecine struggle over the future of the Republican Party, but the strength of the party’s conservatives in Congress and the rightward tilt of the next generation of party leaders could limit any course correction.

With their party on the verge of losing the popular presidential vote for the fifth time in six elections, Republicans across the political spectrum anticipate a prolonged and probably divisive period of self-examination.

The coming debate will be centered on whether the party should keep pursuing the antigovernment focus that grew out of resistance to the health care law and won them the House in 2010, or whether it should focus on a strategy that recognizes the demographic tide running strongly against it.

“There will be some kind of war,” predicted Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican Party consultant, suggesting it would pit “mathematicians” like him, who argue that the party cannot keep surrendering the votes of Hispanics, blacks, younger voters and college-educated women, against the party purists, or “priests,” as he puts it, who believe that basic conservative principles can ultimately triumph without much deviation.

“We are in a situation where the Democrats are getting a massive amount of votes for free,” Mr. Murphy said.

But the debate will not just be about demographics. Ralph Reed, a veteran of the conservative movement, said that Mr. Romney’s loss would stir resentment among those who believe the party made a mistake in nominating a more centrist Republican who had to work to appeal to the party’s base.

“There’s definitely a feeling that it would be better to nominate a conservative of long-standing conviction,” he said.

As a party, Republicans continue to depend heavily on older working-class white voters in rural and suburban America — a shrinking percentage of the overall electorate — while Democrats rack up huge majorities among urban voters including blacks, Hispanics and other minorities. Not to mention younger Americans who are inclined to get their political news from Comedy Central and will not necessarily become more conservative as they age. The disparity means that Democrats can get well under 50 percent of the white vote and still win the presidency, a split that is only going to widen in the future.

According to exit polls, about 7 in 10 Hispanics said they were voting for Mr. Obama. Mr. Romney won the support of nearly 6 in 10 whites. In urban areas, white voters were split over the two candidates, but about 6 in 10 white voters in the suburbs went for Mr. Romney, as did nearly two-thirds in rural areas.  

Mr. Romney won a majority of voters 65 or older, while Mr. Obama was backed by 6 in 10 Americans under 30, and won a narrow majority of those under 44.

Even as they absorbed Mr. Romney’s defeat, the party’s top elected officials, strategists and activists said they believed that Republicans had offered a persuasive message of economic opportunism and fiscal restraint. While the messenger may have been flawed, they argued, Republicans should not stray from that approach in a moment of panic.

“The party has to continually ask ourselves, what do we represent?” said Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican seen as a top White House contender in 2016. “But we have to remain the movement on behalf of upward mobility, the party people identify with their hopes and dreams. People want to have a chance.”

Matt Kibbe, the president of the Tea Party-aligned group FreedomWorks, acknowledged there would be a natural struggle for the identity of the party in the election’s aftermath. But he argued that in some respects the fight had already been waged and won by the energized grass-roots forces that have shaped the contours of Republican politics in recent elections.

“You are going to see a continuation of the fight between the old guard and all of the new blood that has come in since 2010, but I don’t know how dramatic it is going to be,” he said. “It is getting to point where you can’t reach back and pull another establishment Republican from the queue like we have done with Romney.”

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