This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
Economy Is Seen as the Crucial Issue as Voters Decide
Networks Project Second Term for Obama
(about 2 hours later)
The polls closed in Ohio, Virginia, Florida and New Hampshire on Tuesday night, wrapping up the voting in the first of the battleground states that will help decide whether President Obama is elected to a second term or is replaced by Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor.
President Obama carried New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and was projected by television networks Tuesday to win Wisconsin, three states Mitt Romney had pursued to block Mr. Obama’s re-election. The narrowing path to victory for Mr. Romney was reliant on the outcome of closely contested races in Florida, Ohio and Virginia.
Some results became clear in states where there was somewhat less suspense. By 9 p.m., Mr. Romney was projected to win a wide swath of the South, according to The Associated Press, including Kentucky, West Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee, while Mr. Obama was projected to win a number of Northern states, including Connecticut, New York, Illinois, Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine and Rhode Island. All told, Mr. Obama was projected to win 94 electoral votes, and Mr. Romney 76. Winning the presidency requires 270 electoral votes.
As a succession of states fell away from Mr. Romney, a hush fell over his Boston headquarters. Advisers sounded uncharacteristically pessimistic about what they acknowledged were dwindling chances of winning an Electoral College majority.
The early results marked the beginning of the end of a long, hard-fought campaign that centered on who would better heal the battered economy and on what role government should play in the 21st century. It was a race in which the candidates, parties and well-heeled outside groups were on pace to spend some $2.6 billion.
The mood at the Obama campaign in Chicago was optimistic as the outcome of the hard-fought presidential race was dependent on Mr. Romney’s running the table in the rest of the competitive battleground states.
With long lines to vote in many states — there were waits of more than four hours at some sites in Florida, where Republican officials cut back the number of days of early voting — some election officials announced that they would allow people to vote as long as they were standing in line when the polls closed. The Obama campaign urged its supporters to stay in line and vote, with Mr. Obama posting to his Twitter feed: “Reminder: If you’re waiting to vote in Florida, #StayInLine! As long as you were in line when polls closed, you can still vote.”
Americans delivered a final judgment on a long and bitter campaign that drew so many people to the polls that several key states extended voting for hours. In Virginia and Florida, long lines stretched from polling places, with the Obama campaign sending text messages to supporters in those areas, saying: “You can still vote.”
Mr. Romney, a Republican, cast his vote Tuesday morning near his home in Belmont, Mass. When a reporter asked him for whom he had voted, Mr. Romney replied, “I think you know.” Mr. Obama voted Oct. 25 in Chicago, becoming one of more than 31 million people who voted early this year.
The state-by-state pursuit of 270 electoral votes was being closely tracked by both campaigns, with Mr. Romney winning North Carolina and Indiana, which Mr. Obama carried four years ago. But Mr. Obama won Michigan, the state where Mr. Romney was born, and Minnesota, a pair of states that Republican groups had spent millions of dollars trying to make competitive.
Early exit poll results found, unsurprisingly, that the No. 1 issue on the minds of voters was the economy. While three-quarters of voters rated the national economy as not so good or poor, only 3 in 10 said it was getting worse, while 4 in 10 said it was getting better. Half of voters said that President George W. Bush was more to blame for the nation’s current economic problems, while 4 in 10 said that Mr. Obama was.
The contests were hanging on the outcome of only a few key counties in the battleground states. In Florida, for example, the two candidates were separated by only thousands of votes out of more than six million ballots cast, with nearly 90 percent of precincts reporting.
Voters gave a narrow edge to Mr. Romney when asked which candidate would better handle the economy.
The top issue on the minds of voters was the economy, according to interviews, with three-quarters of those surveyed saying that economic conditions were not good or poor. But only 3 in 10 said things were getting worse, and 4 in 10 said the economy was improving.
But the exit polls found that Mr. Obama had an edge on empathy, with somewhat more voters saying he was more in touch with people like them. A plurality of voters said his policies generally favored the middle class, while more than half said Mr. Romney’s favored the rich.
Mr. Romney, who campaigned aggressively on his ability to reverse the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, was given a narrow edge when voters were asked which candidate was better equipped to handle the economy, the interviews found.
The president visited a campaign office in Chicago on Tuesday morning, where he called and thanked several startled volunteers in Wisconsin and then spoke briefly to the reporters who were traveling with him, congratulating Mr. Romney for having run a “spirited campaign.”
The electorate was split along partisan lines over a question that has driven much of the campaign debate: whether it was Mr. Obama or his predecessor, George W. Bush, who bore the most responsibility for the nation’s continued economic challenges. Roughly half of independent voters said that Mr. Bush should be held responsible.
“I also want to say to Governor Romney, congratulations on a spirited campaign,” Mr. Obama said. “I know that his supporters are just as engaged and just as enthusiastic and working just as hard today. We feel confident we’ve got the votes to win, that it’s going to depend ultimately on whether those votes turn out. And so I would encourage everybody on all sides just to make sure that you exercise this precious right that you have that people fought so hard for, for us to have.”
Americans went to the polls in makeshift voting sites in East Coast communities devastated by Hurricane Sandy and traditional voting booths set up in school gyms, libraries and town halls across the rest of the country. Even though more than 30 million Americans had already voted before Election Day, many people said they waited for hours to cast their ballots on Tuesday.
Both campaigns continued trying to grind out votes on Tuesday. Mr. Obama planned a round of satellite television interviews with local stations in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Washington and Wisconsin. Mr. Romney planned campaign stops in Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
At one precinct in Prince William County, Va., election officials expected lines to remain until 10 p.m. or later. Tony Guiffre, the secretary of the elections board in the county, said hundreds of voters in line when the polls were scheduled to close at 7 p.m. were ushered inside the school and the doors were closed.
Considering the way both men have sometimes seemed to be campaigning for the presidency of Ohio — given the repeated stops they made there in their efforts to claim the state’s 18 electoral votes — it was perhaps unsurprising that the two campaigns should cross paths there on Election Day. Mr. Romney was waiting in his campaign plane in Cleveland on Tuesday morning for the arrival of his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, when another plane touched down and could be seen taxiing nearby. It was carrying Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Four years after Mr. Obama drew broad support across so many categories of voters, the national electorate appeared to have withdrawn to its more familiar demographic borders, according to polls conducted by Edison Research. Mr. Obama’s coalition included support from blacks, Hispanics, women, those under 30, those in unions, gay men and lesbians and Jews.
If both campaigns could seem small at times, the issues confronting the nation remained big: how to continue to rebuild after the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression; whether to put into place Mr. Obama’s health care law to cover the uninsured, or undo it; whether to reshape Medicare for future beneficiaries to try to curb its costs; whether to raise taxes to reduce the federal deficit or to rely on spending cuts alone; how to wind down the war in Afghanistan without opening the region to new dangers; and how to navigate the post-Arab Spring world.
Mr. Romney’s coalition included disproportionate support from whites, men, older people, high-income voters, evangelicals, those from suburban and rural counties, and those who call themselves adherents of the Tea Party — a group that had resisted him through the primaries but fully embraced him by Election Day.
A narrow majority of voters approved of the way Mr. Obama was handling his job as president, early exit poll results found. Slightly more voters said they trusted Mr. Obama more to handle an international crisis than they did Mr. Romney. A majority said Mr. Obama would better handle Medicare. But a narrow majority said Mr. Romney would better handle the deficit.
It was the first presidential election since the 2010 Supreme Court decision loosening restrictions on political spending, and the first in which both major party candidates opted out of the campaign matching system that imposes spending limits in return for federal financing. And the overall cost of the campaign rose accordingly, with all candidates for federal office, their parties and their supportive “super PACs” spending more than $6 billion combined.
On their frenzied final full day of campaigning, the candidates reprised their central arguments before crowds in the same handful of swing states where the campaign has been waged for much of the last year, as both men have battled for the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. The campaigns were hoping that huge turnout efforts would tilt contested states their way.
The results Tuesday were certain to be parsed for days to determine just what effect the spending had, and who would be more irate at the answer — the donors who spent millions of dollars of their own money for a certain outcome, or those who found a barrage of negative advertising to be major factors in their defeats.
For all the twists and turns that the race has taken since the candidates downed their first greasy pork chops on sticks at the Iowa State Fair, those core, competing messages have remained remarkably consistent.
While the campaign often seemed small and petty, with Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama intensely quarreling and bickering, the contest was actually rooted in big and consequential decisions, with the role of the federal government squarely at the center of the debate.
Mr. Obama reminded a crowd in Columbus, Ohio, on Monday how bad things were when he took office, listed his achievements and argued that he had more work to do.
Though Mr. Obama’s health care law galvanized his most ardent opposition, and continually drew low ratings in polls as a whole, interviews with voters found that nearly half wanted to see it kept intact or expanded, a quarter wanted to see it repealed entirely and another quarter said they wanted portions of it repealed.
“In 2008, we were in the middle of two wars and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Mr. Obama said. “Today our businesses have created nearly five and a half million new jobs. The American auto industry has come roaring back. Home values are on the rise. We’re less dependent on foreign oil than any time in the last 20 years. Because of the service and sacrifice of our brave men and women in uniform, the war in Iraq is over. The war in Afghanistan is ending. Al Qaeda’s on the path to defeat. Osama bin Laden is dead. We’ve made progress these last four years.”
Even after such a bruising campaign, the interviews showed that a narrow majority of voters approved of Mr. Obama’s job performance. In an indication that his handling of the response to Hurricane Sandy helped his standing, three-fifths of those surveyed said it was a factor in their vote, and two-fifths said it was an important one.
Mr. Romney told a crowd in Lynchburg, Va., on Monday that the country needed a new direction after Mr. Obama. “He’s tried to convince you that these last four years have been a success,” he said. “And so his plan for the next four years is to take all the ideas from the first term — the stimulus, the borrowing, Obamacare, all the rest — and do them over again. He calls that ‘Forward.’ I call it ‘Forewarned.’ The same course we’ve been on won’t lead to a better destination. The same path means $20 trillion of debt at the end of a second term. It means crippling unemployment continuing for another four years. It means stagnant take-home pay. It means depressed home values. And of course, it means a devastated military.”
The interviews with voters found that Mr. Obama had an edge on empathy, with somewhat more voters saying he was more in touch with people like them. A plurality said his policies generally favored the middle class, while more than half said Mr. Romney’s favored the rich.
But at times the campaign has been as notable for what was left unsaid as for what was said.
Mr. Romney’s campaign was intently focused in the final weeks of the campaign on shaving down Mr. Obama’s at times considerable advantage among female voters, running ads emphasizing, for example, that his opposition to abortion did not extend to cases of rape or incest.
Both men seemed to avoid speaking of some of their biggest legislative achievements. Mr. Romney rarely invoked the health care law he enacted as the governor of Massachusetts — a model for Mr. Obama’s health care law — which many Republicans derided as “Obamacare” and which Mr. Romney has vowed to repeal. And Mr. Obama, for his part, rarely spoke about the $787 billion stimulus bill he signed early in his term, which used a combination of tax cuts, aid to states and infrastructure spending to try to bolster the economy — but which was seen as insufficient by some liberals and as inefficient by some conservatives.
But the interviews showed that women and men continued to have starkly different views of the candidates. A majority of men said they were angry or dissatisfied with Mr. Obama’s administration; a majority of women said they were enthusiastic or satisfied with it.
For all the clear differences between the two men, they were both somewhat hazy about their plans for the next four years.
As ballots were counted into the night on Tuesday, the contests in Florida, Virginia and Ohio were exceedingly close, according to early tallies and interviews with both campaigns. The 18 electoral votes of Ohio remained the central focus of the race, a key to the strategies of both sides.
Mr. Romney called for cutting income tax rates across the board by 20 percent while offsetting the lost revenue by eliminating tax breaks, but failed to specify which ones, even after some nonpartisan groups questioned whether it was mathematically possible for him to achieve all his goals. He called for overhauling the Medicare system so that a decade from now, beneficiaries would receive fixed amounts of money from the federal government with which to buy private or public coverage — and even tapped Mr. Ryan, one of the main proponents of such an approach, as his running mate. But he declined to give details of just how it would work, making it difficult to evaluate.
As Mr. Romney gained steam and stature in the final weeks of the campaign, the Obama campaign put its hopes in one thing perhaps above all others: that the rebound in the auto industry after the president’s bailout package of 2009 would give him the winning edge in Ohio, a linchpin of his road to re-election.
And Mr. Obama did not lay out a detailed agenda for his second term, and instead spoke generally of trying to finish the things left undone in his first term. If he wins, though, he is still likely to face the opposition of the Republicans in Congress who have blocked many of his initiatives. So during the campaign Mr. Obama made it clear that he still wanted to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws, which he failed to persuade Congress to do in his first term. In the course of three debates he did not even utter the words “climate change,” an issue that was thrust to the fore soon afterward when Hurricane Sandy made landfall, destroying parts of the Jersey Shore and flooding Manhattan.
Early interviews with voters showed that just over half of Ohio voters approved of the bailout, a result that was balanced by a less encouraging sign for the president: Some 4 in 10 said they or someone in their household had lost a job over the last four years.
As tightly scripted as both campaigns were, there were moments when both candidates were knocked off their messages, sometimes in revealing ways.
A final and frenetic get-out-the-vote drive took place on Tuesday.
Mr. Romney’s trip abroad over the summer was overshadowed by controversy after he offended his British hosts by publicly questioning whether they were prepared for the London Olympics. Then, there was the release of a secretly recorded videotape that captured Mr. Romney telling wealthy donors that 47 percent of Americans paid no taxes and saw themselves as victims. And one of the big moments of his campaign, his speech at the Republican National Convention, was upstaged by the odd introduction he received from Clint Eastwood, who spoke to an empty chair representing the president.
Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, cast his vote Tuesday morning near his home in Belmont, Mass. When a reporter asked him for whom he had voted, Mr. Romney replied, “I think you know.”
Mr. Obama’s low-wattage performance at the first presidential debate, in Denver — he later joked that he had had a “nice long nap” there — wound up dispiriting his supporters and firing up opponents. The deadly attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks thrust the president into a complex national security crisis near the end of the campaign. And earlier in the campaign, Mr. Obama was knocked off his timetable and publicly endorsed same-sex marriage earlier than he had planned after Mr. Biden got out ahead of the administration and voiced his own support of it.
Both campaigns continued trying to grind out votes on Tuesday, with Mr. Romney joining his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, in Cleveland. They crossed paths with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who also wedged in one final visit to Ohio, where the 18 electoral votes are at the center of both campaigns’ strategies.
The biggest unplanned moment, of course, occurred when Hurricane Sandy hit and knocked the presidential campaign off the front pages the week before the election. As the scope of the disaster sank in, there was a brief respite from campaigning. Then it resumed, at a more frenetic pace than ever.
Mr. Obama had voted Oct. 25 in Chicago, becoming one of more than 31 million people who voted early this year. The president visited a campaign office in Chicago on Tuesday morning, where he called and thanked several startled volunteers in Wisconsin and then spoke briefly to the reporters who were traveling with him, congratulating Mr. Romney for his campaign.
There were long lines of voters in many of the swing states that will decide the election. In Kensington, N.H. — a swing town in a swing county in a swing state — Lee Veader said he hoped that the election would bring relief from what he said had been the most acidic campaign that he could remember, with partisanship as rife in his own social circles as it had been on cable television.
“I also want to say to Governor Romney, congratulations on a spirited campaign,” Mr. Obama said. “I know that his supporters are just as engaged and just as enthusiastic and working just as hard today. We feel confident we’ve got the votes to win, that it’s going to depend ultimately on whether those votes turn out.”
“There’s really people that we’re close with that are willing to let politics end relationships — we’re talking friends that you’ve been friends with for years that all of a sudden can’t get past not sharing the same viewpoint,” said Mr. Veader, a registered Republican who voted for Mr. Romney. “People really feel strongly how they stand nowadays. It’s not as gray as it used to be — because of that, it just gets personal.”
As he waited to learn his fate on Tuesday, Mr. Obama conducted a round of satellite television interviews with local stations to urge his supporters to cast their ballots. Then, he continued a tradition he started four years ago of playing basketball on the afternoon of Election Day.
Diane Chigas, a receptionist at a law firm who is an independent voter, said that she was voting for Mr. Obama, in large part because of his health care law. “I had to work through two years of chemo so I wouldn’t lose my insurance,” Ms. Chigas said. “I’m not a pre-existing condition. I’m a person.”
Dennis Carroll, a retired small-business owner, said that he opposed Mr. Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy and that he was voting for Mr. Romney. “He’s doing class warfare,” Mr. Carroll said of the president. “I’m not a rich guy, but they pay their fair share.”
