TIME
When historians look back at the 2008 presidential landslide, they won’t focus on the fact that Barack Obama — soon to be our 44th President and our first African American commander-in-chief — ran a smart and steady campaign. They won’t focus on William Ayers or Joe the Plumber or socialism or racism. They won’t debate whether John McCain blew it by targeting Pennsylvania or avoiding the press or ignoring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright or picking Sarah Palin. They won’t remember the robocalls or “cling” or the Paris Hilton ad or the crazy chick who carved the B into her face. The pundits filling airtime on their 24-hour news channels might have cared, but posterity won’t.
No, when historians analyze the 2008 campaign, they’re going to remember that the two-term Republican president had 20 percent approval ratings, that the economy was in meltdown, and that Americans didn’t want another Republican president. They’ll also remember that Barack Obama was a change candidate in a change election. And of course they’ll remember that America elected a biracial leader less than a half-century after Jim Crow. But that’s just about all they’ll remember. Politics is a lot simpler than the pundits pretend.
The Republican recriminations will be ugly, but John McCain was probably the most electable candidate the party had: a genuine war hero with an impressive record of public service that didn’t always include marching in lockstep with George W. Bush. He threw some Hail Mary passes — Palin, the “suspension” of his campaign — but he didn’t have much of a choice against a Democratic tide. He was the right guy in the wrong year. If Washington Republicans decide that he lost because he was too squishy on immigration, or too pro-regulation in his response to the economic crisis, or too mavericky, they could find themselves cocooning in the wilderness for a long time. (See pictures of John McCain’s final push on the campaign trail.)
Remember what eight years of Republican rule has wrought: Missing weapons of mass destruction, the promises we’d be greeted as liberators, Jessica Lynch, torture, the disintegration of Afghanistan. Also: Enron, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie and Freddie, GM, Chrysler, Social Security privatization, the $700 billion bailout. Also: Brownie, John Ashcroft covering up that bare-breasted statue at the Justice Department, Alberto Gonzales politicizing the Justice Department, Harriet Miers, the oil lobbyist who edited those global warming reports. Also: Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, Tom DeLay, Ted Stevens. Also: the vice president shot a guy, and the president almost choked to death on a pretzel.
And McCain still almost won Virginia! It’s going down to the wire in Florida! All things considered, that’s a pretty impressive showing.
The pundits are already warning that Obama could overreach, that Democratic congressional leaders are still unpopular, that this is still a center-right country. But it wasn’t tonight. Obama will have the luxury of taking office at a time when the GOP is the AIG of electoral politics, when his predecessor has set the lowest bar since James Buchanan, when a supposedly conservative administration just started nationalizing the banking system, when the public is desperate for change. What is it about tonight’s results that suggests Obama should be afraid of progressive action on the cusp of a depression?
But those are questions for another day. The big news tonight is that whether or not there’s a Bradley Effect, it’s nowhere near as big as the Bush Effect. And now a guy who would have had to ride the back of the bus in some of this country when he was a kid has grown up to run this country. Historians will remember that.
Washington DC – Nov. 5, 2008, 01:20 PM
Obama
Electoral vote: 338
Popular vote: 54,338,898
McCain
Electoral vote: 156
Popular vote: 49,763,557
Obama wins California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, Virginia, Washington
McCain wins Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utha, West Virginia, Wyoming
Supporters cheer during the election night party for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama at Grant Park in Chicago, Tuesday night
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Democratic Sen. Barack Obama moved within 75 electoral votes of becoming the first African-American president in history on Tuesday night, winning Ohio, Pennsylvania and several other large Eastern and Midwestern states, according to projections by NBC News.Obama won his home state, Illinois. Republican Sen. John McCain was in a close fight in his home state, Arizona, in a race that NBC News said was too close to call.
Overall, Obama had won 195 of the 270 electoral votes he would need to clinch the election, while McCain had won 85.
Obama took Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey and New York, all of them states with hefty electoral vote hauls, NBC News projected. McCain won numerous smaller states, primarily in the South.
Ohio was an especially important bellwether.
President Bush won Ohio in 2004, meaning Obama was able to flip a big Republican state even as McCain failed in his quest to turn over Pennsylvania, which Democratic Sen. John Kerry took four years ago.
Record turnout delays key results
Florida and Virginia were also closely watched, but results there and in other important states were expected to be delayed after record numbers of voters flocked to polling stations, energized by an election in which they would select either the nation’s first black president or its first female vice president.
Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, led in nearly all public opinion polls over McCain, a veteran senator from Arizona. Both campaigns launched get-out-the-vote efforts that led to long lines at polling stations in a contest that Democrats were also hoping would help them expand their majorities in both houses of Congress.
Americans were voting in numbers unprecedented since women were given the franchise in 1920. Secretaries of state predicted turnouts approaching 90 percent in Virginia and Colorado and 80 percent or more in big states like Ohio, California, Texas, Virginia, Missouri and Maryland.
At New Shiloh Church Ministries on Mastin Lake in Huntsville, Ala., Stephanie Lacy-Conerly brought along a chair, expecting to stay for hours.
“It’s exciting,” she said. “It’s an historical moment.”
As we reach 10 p.m. ET, Barack Obama appears to be on the path to 270 electoral votes and the presidency.
The major dominoes to fall over the last hour — Pennsylvania and Ohio for Obama — as well as a series of too-close-to-call states — Indiana, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina — all point to the fact that Obama is the odds-on favorite to be the 44th president of the United States.
Obama currently sits at 195 electoral votes to McCain’s 85. Even if McCain sweeps all of the toss up states we mentioned above, he still stands at only 136 electoral votes. And, with almost certain wins for Obama in Iowa and New Mexico — both of which were carried by Bush in 2004 — Obama would stand fewer than 90 votes away from the presidency.
What we have seen so far on this election night is that Obama has made good on his promise to expand the map — running surprisingly strong in places like Indiana and North Carolina, states which haven’t voted for a Democrat for president in modern political history.
Obama’s ability to expand the map will be traced to two major factors: the widespread unpopularity of President Bush and the Illinois senator’s massive fundraising edge over John McCain.
National exit polling showed that roughly three-quarters of the electorate disapproved of the job that Bush was doing — more than 50 percent doing so strongly.
Couple that dissatisfaction with Bush and Republicans with Obama’s massive fundraising operation, which has funded huge television campaigns and get out the vote organizations in key battleground states, and you begin to get a sense of how the Illinois senator has broken the red state-blue state deadlock of the 2000 and 2004 elections.
– Chris Cillizza | Washington Post
WASHINGTON (AP) — Barack Obama built a formidable lead in his bid to become the first black president Tuesday night, pushing ahead of John McCain in a nation clamoring for change. Fellow Democrats took four Senate seats from Republicans, and reached for more.
Obama gained precious ground in Pennsylvania, winning the state’s 21 electoral votes and depriving McCain of the Democratic-leaning state where he had tried hardest to break through. Obama also swept through territory typically friendly to Democrats in the East and Midwest.
McCain countered in the safest of Republican states.
That left the battlegrounds to settle the race: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado and more. Most were customarily Republican, but Obama spent millions hoping to peel away enough to make him the 44th president, and his triumph in Pennsylvania left the Republican with scant room for error.
“May God bless whoever wins tonight,” President Bush told dinner guests at the White House, according to spokeswoman Dana Perino.
A jubilant crowd of thousands gathered in Grant Park in downtown Chicago on an unseasonably mild night, confident it would be Obama. They reacted each time Obama was announced the winner in another state — and the cheers were particularly loud when Pennsylvania fell.
Interviews with voters suggested that almost six in 10 women were backing Obama nationwide, and men leaned his way by a narrow margin. Just over half of whites supported McCain, giving him a slim advantage in a group that Bush carried overwhelmingly in 2004.
The results of The Associated Press survey were based on a preliminary partial sample of nearly 10,000 voters in Election Day polls and in telephone interviews over the past week for early voters.
The same survey showed the economy was by far the top Election Day issue. Six in 10 voters said so, and none of the other top issues — energy, Iraq, terrorism and health care — was picked by more than one in 10.
The AP made its calls of individual states based on surveys of voters as they left the polls.
Obama led in electoral votes with 175 of the 270 needed to win the White House. McCain had 61.
The Democrat’s states included Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia.
McCain had Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Alabama, South Carolina and North Dakota.
The nationwide popular vote was remarkably close. Totals from 13 percent of the nation’s precincts showed Obama with 49.9 percent and McCain with 49.2.
Democrats celebrated Senate successes in Virginia, where former Gov. Mark Warner won an open seat, in New Mexico, where Rep. Tom Udall did likewise. In New Hampshire, former Gov., Jeanne Shaheen defeated Republican Sen. John Sununu in a rematch of their 2002 race, and North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole fell to Democrat Kay Hagan.
That wasn’t the end of the Democratic targets, though. Republicans all but conceded in advance they would lose a seat in Colorado, and perhaps elsewhere.
Democrats also looked for gains in the House. They found their first in Florida, defeating Rep. Tom Feeney.
The resurgent Democrats also elected a governor in one of the nation’s traditional bellwether states when Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon won his race.
The White House was the main prize of the night on which 35 Senate seats and all 435 House seats were at stake. In both houses, Democrats hoped to pad their existing majorities, and Republicans braced for losses.
A dozen states elected governors, and ballots across the country were dotted with issues ranging from taxes to gay rights.
An estimated 187 million voters were registered, and in an indication of interest in the battle for the White House, 40 million or so had already voted as Election Day dawned. Turnout was heavy. In Virginia, for example, officials estimated nearly 75 percent of eligible voters would cast ballots.
Obama awaited the results at home in Chicago after a marathon campaign across 21 months and 49 states. At 47, with only four years in the Senate, he sought election as one of the youngest presidents, and one of the least experienced in national political affairs.
That wasn’t what set the Illinois senator apart, though — neither from his rivals nor from the 43 men who had served as president since the nation’s founding more than two centuries ago. A black man, he confronted a previously unbreakable barrier as he campaigned on twin themes of change and hope in uncertain times.
McCain, a prisoner of war during Vietnam, a generation older than his rival at 72, waited in Arizona to learn the outcome of the election. It was his second try for the White House, following his defeat in the battle for the GOP nomination in 2000.
A conservative, he stressed his maverick’s streak. And a Republican, he did what he could to separate himself from an unpopular president.
For the most part, the two presidential candidates and their running mates, Republican Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska and Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, spent weeks campaigning in states that went for Bush four years ago. Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada drew most of their time. Pennsylvania also drew attention as McCain sought to invade traditionally Democratic turf.
McCain and Obama each won contested nominations — the Democrat outdistancing former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton — and promptly set out to claim the mantle of change.
“I am not George W. Bush,” McCain said in one debate.
Obama retorted that he might as well be, telling audiences in state after state that the Republican had voted with the president 90 percent of the time across eight years of the Bush administration.
The race was easily the costliest in history, in excess of $1 billion, more after the congressional campaigns were counted.
McCain accepted federal matching funds, and was limited to $84 million for the fall campaign.
After first saying he would go along, Obama reversed course, then raised and spent multiples of what his rival was allowed.
McCain sought to make an issue of that, saying Obama had broken his word to the public. For weeks on end, he could not match his rival’s television advertising onslaught.
Figures through mid-October showed Obama had spent roughly $240 million on television and radio advertisements.
McCain had shelled out about $115 million, and the Republican National Committee an additional $80 million on his behalf.
